This is what Atlassian's Work Futurist thinks about the future of work

Atlassian Work Futurist, Dominic Price, reveals how Atlassian unleashes the potential in every team by putting in place the processes of the future.

Video transcript

DOMINIC PRICE: Five years ago, it was an exec team [INAUDIBLE] having a conversation. Our mission is to unleash the potential in every team, OK? And we're having the conversation-- we're like hang on, team work's changing. So what tends to happen in teamwork is you look backwards. You do research and you look at all the research of how teams used to operate. And I'm like that's not our job. Our job is to make team work better in the future.

So we agreed that we needed to understand what teamwork might look like in the future. And so we decided that having a role of work futurist made sense. And essentially we said this isn't a role that involves a crystal ball, it's about saying what are the things changing in the world right now that will impact how we work in the future. And how can we find a way of changing one thing today to work better tomorrow?

So, you know, the very first incarnation of my role was to say we're going to double in size. So the way we hired, the way we on board people-- if we were hiring 500 people a year, that's not going to work when we hire 1,000 people. So we're, like, cool, let's build the way of hiring 1,000 people now even though we don't need 1,000 people yet. How are those people going to work? How are our team's going to be effective? How do we scale how our teams work?

And so we worked on that internally and then what we quickly realized was our customers came knocking on our door and saying we need help with how we do teamwork too? We need help with how to make faster decisions? We need help-- how do we collaborate across teams and across functions? We need help with how do we make our teams more effective, right? And so they came to us, we're, like, oh, well, we've been solving that for ourselves so we'll just share it.

So half my role is externally facing, helping our customers understand the future of work and make changes today. And then the other half is internally facing saying, how do we scale Atlassian? And the Atlassian stories go out and the customer stories come back in and they feed each other. So it's a fascinating combination of just thinking far enough out to understand the feature, but the whole reason for doing that is what's one thing we can do today to improve how we work.