Andrew Boyagi: Better, Experience, Productivity, System | Work 20XX Ep35

Andrew Boyagi: Better, Experience, Productivity, System | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick Ep35

Cold Open:
All right, 
so I’ll count us down 
and we will go 
in three, two, one. 

Jeff Frick:
Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here coming to you not from the home office coming to you from Anaheim, California to check in on the Atlassian Team ‘25 event These guys are on the future of work and have been for a long time. So I was excited to, to roll down here and get the latest. So I'm excited to have my first guest He’s Andrew Boyagi He is the Global Head of DevOps Evangelism. Andrew, great to see you. 

Andrew Boyagi:
Hey Jeff, thanks for having me. 

Jeff Frick:
Absolutely. So I love people that have evangelism in their titles. Like, you know, on one hand you talk about process and helping people, but on the other, what makes it an evangelical? What is it is that you're out with your message to help people get better at basically, you like to say, getting better code developed quicker. 

Andrew Boyagi:
Yeah, I mean, the areas that I usually cover with people are around developer experience and productivity, but also helping teams just work better together as well. 

Jeff Frick:
You just came out with the latest Atlassian ‘System of Work’ That comes out I think, every year. What were some of the, What were some of the new findings and best practices this year? 

Andrew Boyagi:
So like we announced today during our keynote, we're really focusing on helping teams, do a lot of things together, so Tracking work against company goals about, unlocking knowledge across teams and then also, helping them to deliver work according to their company's priorities. So we're focusing on a few different things there. 

Jeff Frick:
And you just And you just highlighted that in a recent post I saw getting ready for this, where you talked about a project that you did. I think it was a month long project with teams all over the world, people all over the world. While you were traveling, I think you had like 3 or 4 cities. You were traveling and you did the whole thing without meetings. Wow, that is amazing. So share a little bit about, you know, kind of how you decided to make that approach in the first place to see if you could do it without meetings? 

Andrew Boyagi:
Yeah. I mean, I've been thinking. I had been thinking about running a meeting-less project for a while. I mean, nobody likes unnecessary meetings. But I didn't really have an opportunity, and I hadn't put too much thought into it about how I would actually do that. And like you said, I was traveling across multiple time zones. I had I was working with teams also in multiple time zones, and to be honest, it was hurting my brain trying to work out how am I going to get everybody together, to kick off a meeting? Because usually I kick off a project, because kicking off a project, it’s usually something that you do in real time. Right It was I was getting further and further away from where we needed to be. We had, some things, some dates that I wanted to hit that we weren't going to hit. Unless I kicked off the meeting pretty quickly. So I wrote a few Confluence pages. I did a kickoff page on Confluence. It’s a great template you should check that out. And, I recorded a Loom In the Loom, I was just giving everyone the context, talking about what I think we needed to do. In the Loom, I left a lot of space for people to, tell me what they thought we needed to do as well. Like, I was asking questions, saying, you know, I think this is what we need to do, but, you know, if you have some expertise in your craft, let me know what you think. And I was good. I mean people interacted a lot with the Loom. Sometimes I had the wrong person or the wrong team tagged, and they jumped in and tagged the right person in there. And so between Loom, Slack and Confluence we didn't have any meetings. We ran the project that way. Sometimes people would send a Loom back to me to say, hey, I want to explain this thing that we're doing it’s too hard over a written format. So, yeah, I mean, it went really well. No one really even noticed that we didn't have any meetings, 

Jeff Frick:
They didn’t even notice til it was over

Andrew Boyagi:
I was pretty annoyed about that, actually, because I'm like thinking we're getting towards the end of the project. No meetings, no one else scheduled any meetings either. And I'm like, this is an awesome thing. I wonder what everyone’s thinking about it. And I did catch up with a few of the people individually. I'm like, what do you think about that meeting? That, that project, we didn't have any meetings and nearly all of them were like, what do you mean? We didn't have any meeting? Like. We did not have a meeting about it. It was all Loom and Slack. They didn't even notice 

Jeff Frick
they didn't notice 

Andrew Boyagi:
So, I think part of that, as well as in Atlassian, obviously we use all of our products and We do watch a lot of Looms and We do communicate that way so they may not have pieced it together, but, I know I felt like impressed with the team. 

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. That they didn’t didn’t realize, you did it without them noticing. I mean, there's a lot to be said for that I want to ask you about Loom and you guys use Loom a lot here at Atlassian. And I was just in a session with Dom was talking about using it and then your description of this project, you talking about a lot of meeting time is one person kind of sharing information. You know I can do this via Loom. What's weird though, about Loom is I could see people getting a little nervous You know, it's one thing if you're typing and you've got some notes, but to actually put your face on it. I know it conveys a ton more of emotion and subtlety, but do people like, are they trying to, you know, like Instagram, they're trying to get that perfect Loom? How has is it been adopted and how is it being used in terms of it doesn't have to be perfect. It's just a way to get a different piece of communication out. 

Andrew Boyagi:
You say everyone in Atlassian uses Loom a lot. I actually started using Loom before I joined Atlassian. I used to use it with a nutritional studies to work with on the other side of the world. So. Anyway, there's lots of different applications for it. But, you're right. When I first started reporting Looms, when I joined Atlassian especially when you’re doing it professionally, I was a bit nervous the first time, and I think it took me a very long time to record that first Loom because I kept rerecording it, editing it. And so I think I went through a process where now I record a Loom I’ll make mistakes, I don't really care. It's only people I work with. It doesn't need to be perfect, so I think and I’ll swing to other Atlassian’s who also go through that process where the first one’s like ultra high quality, like it's going to be on TV and then you watch others and slowly, slowly, you get more comfortable with being on camera recording, and just sharing things with your peers. I mean, if you're in a meeting, you can't say, oh, let's stop the meeting, we need to get back and I need to do that again.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right. So, But you don’t look at yourself when you're in a meeting, right? You just are talking when you're you're looking at that video before you hit send, you know, it's that little extra pressure, right? 

Andrew Boyagi:
You know, look. There's a lot of them now I don't even watch them before I send them for that reason, because it doesn't really matter as long as I get the message across then it's done. 

Jeff Frick:
Right. In another part of that project you talked about no updates and really being very conscious about focusing on the areas that needed attention versus not necessarily focusing on and getting away from just kind of regular, systematic updates that people fall into this, this whole routine. So how did you manage what stuff you needed to pay attention to and what stuff you didn't need to pay attention to? 

Andrew Boyagi:
Yeah, I mean, so I gave an update to the team every week which is like a round up of, you know, here's where I got to here’s where I think you're all up to as well. Just I used to summarize because we did a lot of collaboration in Confluence and in Slack. So I'd summarize and say here’s here's where everything is at for everyone's visibility. When I started doing that, other people started doing it as well. So they would start sharing an update, every week in Slack or, you know, in various different ways. But everyone just started sending, an update themselves. So I never felt like I needed to have, like, a status meeting or I never really had to ask anybody for a formal update on what was happening. And so I think some of it is leader driven as well. Like if a leader is saying, give me an update every week, then you, you know, most people will start doing that. If the leader just starts sharing an update, other people will do the same. It's just like the way that work happens in the modern world. 

Jeff Frick:
And I'm not familiar with Loom. Does it auto transcribe as well, so that you've got text searchable, information there that you can go back and find and does it, does it index it and do all those things like it would a normal kind of typed note?

Andrew Boyagi:
Yeah. So it, it will do a transcript which, we announced today, you can use right away and get that into a Confluence page. It's indexable. So, it's pretty cool what you can do with it now. 

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. That's cool. So I saw you speak, on talking about developers and trying to help developers be more efficient. And you made a really interesting point specifically how people can use AI because there's a lot of talk, you know, what's the role of AI? And you said, you know, developers are actually pretty good coders, and they only spend about 30% of their time coding. It's the 70% of the other crap that they're working on. And you're, you know, kind of mission is to help people remove that friction. But I thought was really interesting, though. Is you found some really unique cases of AI that that are not being used, just to develop code, but are being used in that other 70% to support the process in some pretty innovative, innovative ideas. I wonder if you can share some of the ways you guys are using AI to help developers, but not necessarily to write code. 

Andrew Boyagi:
Yeah, I mean, like, there's a coding part of a developers’ job like you said it's a minority of their time. And so just to cover the point that you, you also mentioned about AI of a lot of people when they think about AI for developers, they're thinking about writing code writing code faster, writing better code. And, you know, maybe AI is giving developers a small boost in that area. But it's not a point of friction for developers, so it's not going to improve developer experience. It's probably not going to vastly improve productivity. And doesn't make them happier, that's for sure, after speaking to a lot of them about that. But there are ways you can improve developer experience using AI and, the process is the same. You identify a friction point, understand that friction point, deeply identify a way to solve that friction point, which may include AI may not. And, once you remove that, you'll find that developers are not only happier but they are more productive as well. A good example, for us internally, which is a friction point and it’s a friction point for many people is that PR [pull request] cycle time was taking too long. So, developers submit a pull request. People will be they'll be waiting for a review. They start doing other things. You know, if it's a week, for example, someone does their review, gives them feedback. Even if you're not a developer, you can imagine writing a document. You know, in a week you've worked on 50 other things. Someone gives you feedback. You have to go back and reread your own documents, to work out what you wrote. What’s this feedback obviously. Right You know your just, the flow is all over the place when it's like that. So, you really want to reduce that cycle time as much as you can. And so we do have an AI way of using AI to help us with that. We have an AI agent which helps with pull requests, which essentially does, it's like a sparring partner for the developer where it'll do a first review. Of the pull request, it'll pick up, you know, any basic errors that are there. It’ll write a description and that way when it does come for another human to review that pull request, it's already at a good standard and good quality. So it makes that whole cycle a lot faster. Right? 

Jeff Frick:
The part that jumped out to me that you also said that you didn't mention here is is helping the developers, especially that don't have English as their first language.

Andrew Boyagi:
Yeah.

Jeff Frick:
To write a generalized summary of what they did and that, that's just, you know, that's where large LLMs today [Large Language Models] just shine in that type use case. I thought that was pretty innovative. 

Andrew Boyagi:
Yeah. I mean, like, there was a. It wasn't at Atlassian, but I was sitting in an office with some developers, and I had my headphones on and, there was a developer sitting next to me, and then another one was there, and I couldn't really hear anything. I was listening to something, and then eventually there was like four people standing there. And so I took off my headphones and they were going through comments on a pull request and how they're making some comments about the other person, like, What's this guy talking about? Why is he so rude? Like, you know, all these things, and I don't work at that company, but I said, can I, do you mind if I have a look? And I had a look and what was clear to me was that person's first language was probably not English, right. You know, I didn't think there was any, bad intent with what was written, but,

Jeff Frick:
Right

Andrew Boyagi:
But you know, it was just written in a way where, you know, it could be perceived differently. And so just a simple use case for AI, which is change the tone or make it happier or make it sound friendlier or whatever it is can really help people who, you know, who just, you know we all have written an email which has been misinterpreted before. So, you know, I think that's a nice use case as well. 

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. Email is just a horrible communication method. And I remember first time I heard about Atlassian that you guys were not using email internally. I don't know, ten years ago, 12 years ago. I don't know when it when it started it was ten years ago that I heard about it. And to really it kind of speaks to really appreciating people's flow state and really letting people be async and really reducing interruptions. As I would imagine within that 70% interruptions are a pretty, significant inhibitor to productivity.

Andrew Boyagi:
I mean, I don’t use email at work and, it's not only it's not only there's a few things like emails are just a modernized letter, like, I don't want to send someone something to someone I work with and say, Hi, Janet. How are you today? I hope this finds you well. blah, blah, blah. blah. We speak to each other 50 times a day. I'm just going to say, Hey, where did you get up to with this? Or, you know, Can I help you with that or whatever it is? So it's more direct to the point. The other thing is that email really locks knowledge in between a few people. Whoever has the email, which is not helpful when it comes to AI and you would have seen a lot of things that we announced around, being able to discover information across an organization. So to me, using email in that way is an anti-pattern. To me, I like things written in documents or somewhere like Confluence where it’s discoverable by other people where information’s reusable. And I think that really helps unlock other people's flow. 

Jeff Frick:
It's funny, once you go to shared documents on any type of a platform, you're like, oh my gosh, I can't imagine version control. And, you know, sending around revisions and this is version 2.5.2 that Andrew took a look at that, and I have Did you look at this one before Andrew took a look at it? Yeah. I mean it's so much, so much better. 

Andrew Boyagi:
Well even old versions in email like someone attaches a document to an email and it’s like ten revisions old. 

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. And now we're just getting the threads that go on forever and ever. So yeah, emails is not a good thing. So 2025, what are you excited about this year as you guys wrap up the show and get ready for, for, you know, you’re in such a good space because code is only getting more important for enterprises. And the speed of decision making and rolling out is only getting faster and faster. So what are you excited about for this year?

Andrew Boyagi:
Yeah. I'm excited about better use cases for AI, to be honest with you. Like, we spoke about coding for developers earlier. But we're starting to explore more of the the non-coding time, let's call it. But even within that coding time, we've got some, agents that we've released and we're obviously developing more but things that really help developers remove friction points, like we do have a coding agent which is used for things like removing feature flags. So, you know, imagine an engineering manager says, we’ve got this tech debt around. Around, feature flags, our feature flags. Please go and remove it. Nobody wants to do that. Like that's toil. That's friction for someone. You know then imagine you do three and they're like, actually we have 35 more. Can you go and do those as well? So, you know, I'm really looking forward to I feel like last year was a lot of people learning about AI and and finding new use cases. I think this year, we're going to see some of those really come to life. 

Jeff Frick:
Awesome. Well, Andrew, thanks for taking a minute. I know you're busy. Congrats on the show. And, really great event. 

Andrew Boyagi:
Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate it.

Jeff Frick:
All right. Thank you.
He's Andrew I'm Jeff, you're watching Work 20XX special edition from the Atlassian Team ‘25 show down in Anaheim, California. Thanks for watching. Catch you next time. 

Cold Close:
All right.
Awesome.
We’re good
Thank you.
Thank you.

Andrew Boyagi: Better, Experience, Productivity, System | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick Ep35

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