Atlassian Leader: We Need to Balance Productivity, Collaboration
February 20, 2018
By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC
Business communications tools can be helpful in enabling collaboration. But sometimes they also can interrupt workflow. The ideal situation is to balance personal productivity with team collaboration, says Atlassian’s Oji Udezue. That’s what Atlassian delivers with Stride, Udezue told the ITEXPO audience last week.
ITEXPO (News - Alert) took place last week at the Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Udezue, head of product at Atlassian, was among the keynote presenters.
Stride, he explained, starts with team messaging. That’s because Atlassian believes team messaging is much better than email at giving shared context. (If you send email you don’t know if the recipient got it, he said. And it can be unclear if they’re thinking about it or when they’ll respond, he added. Whereas with team messaging, he indicated, you quickly learn all that.)
Video meetings are the other current component of Stride. So that enables Stride users to easily initiate and conduct real-time meetings when it makes sense. (And next year Atlassian plans to add support for meeting rooms. That way organizations with videoconferencing rooms can leverage those assets along with Stride.)
Importantly, Stride also features workflow applications and teamwork elements. They enable Stride users to mark things as an Action or a Decision or a Question or an Update. That makes it easier for users to find what they’re looking for and understand status on an effort. And the platform’s Highlight sidebar calls out the most important parts of the effort or conversation.
Plus, Atlassian offers an API. And it enables works to go into “focus” mode, so other team members know they’re working on their individual part of the effort and should be allowed to do that without interruption.
“The secret ingredient is the freedom to focus,” said Udezue. And that allows people to be part of the team collaboration while ensuring they maximize productivity.
In announcing Stride in September, Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian, said this: "We believe that a communication tool should help people talk less and do more. None of the products in the market today tackle the problem of workplace communication head-on…. We built Stride to bring all the varying ways teams communicate - through text, voice, and video - together into one place. Teams that communicate effectively accomplish more throughout their day because they have the freedom to focus on the things that matter most."
Edited by Mandi Nowitz
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