Atlassian Corporation the provider of team collaboration and productivity software including Jira Software, Confluence and Jira Service Management, announced the appointment of Shamik Sharma to Head of Engineering, Commerce and Enterprise Agility. Shamik will report directly to Rajeev Rajan, CTO of Atlassian.

Shamik joins Atlassian with close to three decades of experience in the field of technology and engineering. He spent the past 5+ years at Cure.fit/Cult.sport, a company he co-founded, and prior to that he served as CTO and CPO at Myntra (a company in the Flipkart group). Across his career, he has held multiple senior leadership positions at Lytro Inc., RockYou, StumbleUpon, Yahoo!, Confluent Software and HP, among others. Having scaled organizations and processes from small founding teams to large & specialized teams, he has also built innovative products in e-commerce, digital advertising, gaming, digital media, social networks, enterprise software, and consumer electronics. Shamik has completed an M.S., Computer Science from the University of Maryland and B.Tech, Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Speaking on the appointment, Rajeev Rajan, Chief Technology Officer, Atlassian, said, “Shamik’s experience in technology and e-commerce will add much value to Atlassian, both globally and in India. We want to become a 100-year company at Atlassian and the meaningful work that our teams are contributing to in India is critical to this trajectory. As India is our fastest-growing R&D site globally, we’re confident that Shamik will only help accelerate our path to building a world-class engineering team.”

Shamik Sharma adds, “With a great passion for building products and combined technical expertise, I’m excited to be joining Atlassian in its mission to unleash the potential of every team. I look forward to leveraging the potential of Atlassian engineering talent to build innovative new products that enhance workplace collaboration.”

Shamik’s appointment comes at the back of Atlassian’s recent hiring of Paranth Thiruvengadam for the role of India Site Leader and Head of Engineering IT Service Management. The company started with just over 60 employees in India 5 years ago and now has over 1,800 employees in 17 states across the country.

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A recent survey of one hundred Fortune 500 executives and another hundred Fortune 1000 executives based in US in reveals that an overwhelming majority of executives (99%) agree that work will only become more distributed in the future. The research from Atlassian Corporation found that all large organizations work in a distributed way, whether they have an in-office policy or not. Distributed work is essentially done online by collaborating across locations vs shoulder-to-shoulder.

As per Atlassian’s Team Anywhere policy, employees can choose to work from home, an office, or a combination of both. This approach has been a success as the company is able to attract and retain top talent. Also, the representation of women at Atlassian in India is more than 2x higher now since practicing Team Anywhere. According to 92% of the employees, the company’s distributed work policy allows them to do their best work, and 91% say it’s an important reason why they stay at Atlassian.  

Annie Dean, Head of Team Anywhere at Atlassian said, “Atlassian is in the business of unleashing team potential. We want to help teams do distributed work well – and the best way to do that is to live it ourselves. Distributed work isn’t a sacrifice – it’s a huge opportunity for businesses and for people — especially underrepresented groups. We’re finding that teams designed to be distributed are actually figuring out better ways of working.” 

“Atlassian is living proof that location flexibility, vibrant offices, and employee engagement can co-exist, even at scale. Our evidence-based approach to distributed work is an opportunity to solve the challenges our customers will face. That’s why we’re so passionate about sharing what we discover – we take what we learn to shape what we build,” she added. 

Some of the findings from the survey include: 

• According to the report, the biggest blockers to productivity, connection, and innovation are not location-based. 98% of the executives agree that where teams work isn’t the problem, it’s how.  
• Only one-third of executives with an in-office policy mandate think that their in-office policies have had any impact on productivity. 
• 87% of executives say their teams do not have visibility into each other’s goals. The biggest barriers to collaboration are that employees don’t know who to collaborate with (39%), employees don’t know how to collaborate effectively (38%) and a lack of ownership of tasks (37%). 

In addition to the survey findings, the Atlassian report ‘Lessons Learned: 1,000 Days of Distributed at Atlassian’ serves as a playbook that shares Atlassian’s experience on what they’ve learned. There have been some important concerns against remote or distributed work, which tend to be based on feelings and gut reactions. The company has made decisions based on data, and this report addresses each of these challenges mentioned in the summary below: 

Distributed challenge 1: Productivity 

Atlassians who participated in an experiment where they “timeboxed” their top priorities declined 17% more meetings than usual and spent 13% less time in meetings. 

Distributed challenge 2: Connection

Team gatherings increase team connection by 27%, and this boost lasts 4-5 months. New hires and new graduates experience the biggest boosts in team connection following an in-person gathering. 

Distributed challenge 3: Offices 

Despite Atlassian having no mandates, the company consistently saw 80% of the Atlassians visit an office each quarter. 

Atlassians working in India annually save approximately a month, as against the global average of approximately 10 days. 

Distributed challenge 4: Culture 

As collaboration increasingly happens online, work and how it gets down will become more of a cultural constant than offices. 

The report concludes by stating that neglecting to adapt to the distributed new normal is not just a missed opportunity but a detriment to an organization’s ability to harness its full business potential. It’s not rocket science: when teams work smarter, they can achieve more, faster, and with better results. 

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Atlassian Corporation, the makers of team collaboration and productivity software including Jira Software, Confluence and Jira Service Management, has announced the general availability of Atlassian Intelligence, its new Generative AI-driven virtual teammate that accelerates teamwork through human-AI collaboration; at ‘Unleash’, its Agile and DevOps focused event. 

The company, in April, announced its ambition to transform teamwork by leveraging AI along with 20 years of data on how millions of software, IT, and business teams plan, track, and deliver work. Since then, 10% of Atlassian’s 265,000+ customers (over 20,000 customers) have been using their AI capabilities in beta. The company said that many are already reporting significant benefits, time savings, and productivity gains. 

Anutthara Bharadwaj, President, Atlassian said, “We’re excited to announce the first wave of Atlassian Intelligence capabilities that are generally available across our Cloud Platform. We believe the future of teamwork will be a partnership between humans and AI, wherever work gets done. As Atlassian Intelligence leverages the information in Jira and Confluence, the benefits you get from AI is more relevant to your unique needs, so everyone can more effectively do their best work by driving speed, efficiency, and excellence.” 

“We are building towards a future where virtual teammates will be the new workflow agent that will help teams sprint from ideas to action at an unprecedented pace,” she added. 

With Atlassian Intelligence, team members can draft pages of business-critical content in seconds, automate routine tasks by simply asking in plain natural language, and summarize long-winded content instantly using AI. 

In the coming future, Atlassian also plans to deploy the Bitbucket code review assistant which will help users review pull request diffs and leave comments automatically with suggested changes, so reviewers spend less time reviewing syntax and code conventions and more time reviewing critical changes. Software developers will also be able to auto-generate PR descriptions from commit messages, providing valuable context to the changes. 

In building, deploying and using Atlassian Intelligence, Atlassian is guided by its Responsible Technology Principles, which focus on transparency, trust, accountability, human-centricity, and teamwork. These principles help the company to take accountability for considering and using technologies like AI responsibly and in line with their values. The company recently launched its Responsible Technology Review Template, a guide to support companies in developing responsible AI and technology practices. 

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