ATLASSIAN

THE POWER OF OPEN WORK

Atlassian believes all teams can do amazing things when they work open. Open is our core belief, and it’s what helps us deliver on not only our promise to customers, but to our own people.

Atlassian’s whole business revolves around the idea that teamwork is best when communication, transparency, and collaboration are embedded into everything we do. We fundamentally believe that all teams have the potential to do amazing things when work is open.

As an Atlassian, you have access to any team’s work and space on Confluence, our collaboration wiki/documentation tool. Want to see what a team is working on, or how our leaders are tracking their team’s objectives and key results? Check out their project plans. It’s not common practice to lock down pages in Confluence. We want everyone to feel like they have skin in the game and contribute where they think they can provide value and new ideas.

Beyond that, Atlassians use Confluence to blog about their work and experiences; we’re adamant about creating an environment that’s all about sharing and having critical conversations. Although many blogs are about company-specific things like new product features or team changes, they also often veer into personal territory. In the past few years we’ve had Atlassians blog about actions they’re taking personally to combat climate change, openly discuss their mental illnesses and how that’s affected them in the workplace, and even shared stories of loss. Blogs are also a way to build belonging in the workplace – such as a recent post, “How not to f@#k up with your trans teammates.”

A public term sheet

We’ve adopted an open mindset across every aspect of our business, including the way we ‘do business’ externally. It’s part of the reason why we opened up our term sheet to the public.

Mergers and acquisitions are a key part of our strategy – over our history, we’ve acquired more than 20 companies for approximately $1 billion, including Trello, Opsgenie, and AgileCraft. And one thing has become very clear to us about the M&A process: It’s outdated, inefficient, and unnecessarily combative, with too much time and energy spent negotiating deal terms and not enough on what matters most – building great products together and delivering more customer value.

One-sided terms are introduced at the outset of the M&A process and require a disproportionate amount of time and goodwill to resolve. This needlessly introduces friction and mistrust, making the far more important task – getting our people and products to work well together – more challenging. We knew there had to be a better way.

In an effort to reduce this unnecessary friction and increase trust we crafted a new M&A term sheet and made it public. To our knowledge, we are the first company to do this. The Atlassian Term Sheet is more favourable to selling companies than any we’ve seen among strategic acquirers in technology.

It’s guided by our research and includes explanations to make our approach more understandable. We’ve done this because we want to be fair to our future team members and we don’t want to spend energy and goodwill on things that almost never matter. And we believe that by being fair and transparent, we can make the M&A process more efficient, human, and aligned with why we acquire companies (and the incredible founders and teams behind them) in the first place.