The Box is Good

It's like playing with LEGO. All you have to do is find the right piece and put it in the right place. It's pretty easy to build your first project, but it can get tricky when your teammates get excited about it and come up with tons of new ideas how to make it better and better.

To Use the Box: Stay Inside

As Consultants, we prefer staying in the box. The reason why we're superfast is not that we eat and train like Usain Bolt. It's because we know quite a lot of LEGO pieces that can solve seemingly difficult problems like charm.

Our clients are amazed by the fact that we deliver working solutions within weeks. We start small, with one team of a few members and a well-defined business process. When the team starts using it, they either ask for more or brag to the other teams how incredibly productive they've just become.

But when there is no piece, we have to decide wisely. It takes too much time and effort and quite risky to build and maintain a custom developed feature. If you're in this business you know what I'm talking about. You have to ask the question: What exactly is not in the box?

To Make the Box Bigger: Think Out of It

And that's where we draw the line between being consultants and being a vendor. As Atlassian Vendors, we have to think out of the box, sometimes even further. When we listen to our customers, or simply use Atlassian products, we look for patterns of missing pieces or situations where users do workarounds to solve problems. In UX, that's a clear sign that there's room for improvement.

Sometimes, as vendors, we have to think like there was no box at all to eliminate frontiers of thinking. If you don’t know the box, you think differently. Just like non-technical users, who actually don’t know the box. But they know exactly what they're missing. That's why they use workarounds.

So we think like our clients. The one thing we learned in our years in product development in other fields is that client feedbacks are golden nuggets only if you treat them wisely. They can be biased by their expertise in your product, their level of work stress, their overall interest in their own work and a lot more. That's the tricky part, where lots of vendors bleed out. We need to be crystal clear about what little missing LEGO piece we want to build and focus on polishing it like a diamond.

Little Things Help the Big Things

As Atlassian Consultants, we believe, that Atlassian products empowered by their existing add-ons have enormous possibilities. These power-ups make the already feature-rich basic tools even more versatile. And more importantly: these little things help the Big Things meet everyday or specialized business needs more accurately.