How Sparking Developer Joy Unlocks Developer Productivity

Less than half of Atlassian's own developers felt productive. Here's the framework they built to fix it.

#1about 3 minutes

Developer joy is the true source of productivity

Atlassian believes that fostering developer joy and the state of flow is the key to unlocking developer productivity and creating better software.

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Measuring developer productivity reveals a satisfaction problem

A simple survey asking developers how productive they feel revealed a satisfaction score of less than 50%, signaling a major internal issue.

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Identifying the root causes of developer friction

Rapid company growth introduced friction, a perceived lack of autonomy, and a fear of breaking things, which eroded developer satisfaction.

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A three-part framework to improve developer experience

The solution involved a three-part framework focused on providing awesome tools, empowering teams, and fostering an amazing engineering culture.

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Providing awesome tools and an open toolchain

Giving developers choice in their tools, building platforms like Compass for microservices, and embracing AI helps reduce friction in their daily work.

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Empowering teams to solve their own productivity blockers

Giving teams the autonomy and time to fix their own nagging issues and introduce automation leads to significant, compounding improvements.

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Building an engineering culture for distributed teams

Atlassian's "Team Anywhere" policy required a shift to a strong writing culture and asynchronous communication to support a fully distributed workforce.

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