#Build 10: Atlassian's Joff Redfern on Scaling Product Teams through Hypergrowth

Seeking Wisdom with David Cancel

Molly Sloan

Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 610 Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2018

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On today’s episode of #Build, host Maggie Crowley sits down with Joff Redfern, VP of Product at Atlassian. Together they talk through Joff’s time as VP of Product at LinkedIn, building a product org from 12 people to 650, the concept of a shipyard, why talent is priority 0, why he chose to join Atlassian and much more. Before you go leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review and share the pod with your friends! Be sure to check out more insights on the Drift blog at drift.com/blog and find us on Twitter @maggiecrowley, @drift , @seekingwisdomio, and @mejoff. In this episode: 0:33 – Maggie introduces Joff 2:19 – Falling in love with the Atlassian vision, needing a calling 3:30 – How LinkedIn shaped Joff’s career 6:45 – Riding the double paradigm shift to mobile and social networks 7:48 – How to scale an organization...Building Your Shipyard 8:52 – Three pieces to a shipyard: values (8:59), people/talent (10:15), practices (10:43) 2:11 – What does it mean to be an Atlassian Product Manager? 15:40 – Having just one set of expectations for hiring, evaluating, and growing talent 19:15 – Keep it simple, because movements are built on slogans 21:52 – Creating autotomy and best practices across the organization 25:15 – Maggie shares about independent work with accountability at Drift 26:00 – Scaling really fast and incrementally improving 28:01 – Joff’s book list: Drive, Zero to One, Thinking Fast and Slow 30:18 – Don’t wait, don’t be afraid to look bad, and embrace creative confrontation

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to another episode of Build.
0:07.3	This is Maggie.
0:08.5	And today I'm extremely lucky to have Jop Redfern with me.
0:11.9	He's the VP of Product at Atlassian.
0:13.9	He was previously VP of products at LinkedIn.
0:16.2	Basically, he's worked across products that many of us, if not all of us, have used.
0:37.7	So Joph, welcome to seeking wisdom. Great. Thanks for having me, Maggie. I'm excited to be here. So there's a ton that I want to get into, especially like we talked about this idea of product craft in your shipyard. But first, tell the audience about yourself in particular. I'd love to know how you got into products, how you found your way to Atlassian and what your experience at LinkedIn during hypergrowth was like. Yeah, great.
0:42.2	So I've been a product leader in Silicon Valley my entire life. So I've been doing this for
0:47.4	decades. I absolutely love it. Can't imagine doing anything else professionally with my life.
0:53.8	I've been really fortunate in
0:55.8	that I've worked for companies that are of very different sizes. So I started a company twice in my
1:02.4	career. I've worked for a company that received over $100 million in venture capital at a point in
1:08.3	time when that was actually still a lot of money. Not like today.
1:11.4	That company then got sold to a larger company. And then I worked for LinkedIn. I was at LinkedIn for
1:17.4	seven years. I joined when it was 450 people and I left when it was about 10,000 employees. So I was
1:24.5	at LinkedIn at a point where it was going through hypergrowth.
1:29.6	That's essentially like winning the lottery to be able to go through such an amazing
1:35.3	journey.
1:36.3	Was there pre-IPO, went through the IPO, and then continued to stay there, had an amazing run at
1:43.9	LinkedIn. I've never worked at a place longer than
1:47.3	seven years. I wound up leaving LinkedIn with the thought that I would start my own company again.
1:53.6	And I had an idea that I was pretty passionate about. I had been running this idea by Reid Hoffman, who was the founder of LinkedIn, and he was giving
	...

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