Area of Effect

In some companies, the default expectation is that you stick to the area where you have been assigned and focus on delivering whatever needs to be delivered within that bounding box.

For example, as a software engineer, you're probably interpreting requirements and turning them into meaningful software increments, with the scope and scale of those requirements changing based on your seniority.

Atlassian expects more.

Watch Out! A Group of Densely Packed Kobolds

Every single role within Atlassian comes with a growth profile of some sort, which helps the people in those roles to understand what is expected from them.

For individual contributors (i.e. non-management), the first three pillars of that growth profile are Project Impact, Craft Excellence and Direction. For managers, the first three pillars are Team Impact, People Management and Collaboration.

But there is a fourth pillar that is common to every role.

Organisational Impact.

This pillar describes the expectation that not only are you doing what needs to be done for your role (i.e. delivering software, managing people, providing direction for how things should move forward) and not only are you doing it well (i.e. delivering high-quality solutions, focusing on creating collaborative outcomes, etc) you also need to be making Atlassian better in general.

For most companies I've worked at, this sort of expectation really only kicks in once you get to a fairly senior role, like a Head of Engineering or a Principal Engineer or something like that.

For Atlassian, it's relevant for everyone, from the newest graduate engineer all the way through to the executives themselves.

Well, I assume it's relevant to the executives, but who knows, they live in a world that is so different from my own that it's hard to even contemplate what is happening there. Kind of like trying to understand an Elder God; that way lies madness.

Now, obviously, we don't expect a Graduate Engineer to be fundamentally reimagining the way that quarterly planning happens across the entire company. I mean, they could probably give it a stab if they wanted to, but I can't imagine it would be easy.

Regardless, to be successful in your role you need to be making the wider organisation better in some way.

Which can be challenging.

We Need To Be Careful, That Many Is Dangerous

There are some basic things you can do to create organisational impact.

For example, you can participate in the recruitment process in some way, primarily by evaluating candidates and providing feedback as an input into hiring decisions.

You can also publish things internally, writing up blog posts around the work that you're doing, the lessons that you learned or any ideas that you might have for how things could be better.

Finally, you can mentor and coach, improving the people around you in order to make the organisation stronger in general. Assuming you're any good at it of course.

Most of the time that's not enough though, especially as your level of seniority rises.

You need something meaty.

Some meaningful change to the way that the organisation operates, an improvement that has a multiplicative effect outside of your immediate area of responsibility.

At this point you have a choice; you can either find someone who is already trying to do something and support them or you can try to come up with a brand new idea all of your own.

The first option is probably the easier one. In any large company, especially one that is as focused on organisational impact as Atlassian, there are going to be plenty of people who are trying to create some sort of change, and they aren't going to be able to do it alone.

Find them, help them, make things better, job done.

The second option is a bit harder because not only do you have to come up with an idea of your own, but you have to critically evaluate whether or not it will really make things better and then figure out how to roll it out across a wider area.

Also, you'll need to find people who can help, because you can't do it alone.

Oh, The Wizard Is Level 5 Now

The overall difficulty of rolling out an idea for organisational improvement is dependent on the number of people that you need to influence and how much control you have over them.

For example, if you're targeting a relatively localised area, like the teams that you work with on a day-by-day basis, then you might just be able to do it by yourself. Social capital, authority, process control, all of those things can work in your favour.

The moment you step outside that sphere of influence though, things get harder.

You need help.

The first approach you can take is company mandates.

If you can convince key people in power of the value of the organisational improvement that you want to make, they can make it a requirement for everyone to follow along.

Of course, that doesn't mean everyone will actually follow along, but it's a hell of a lot easier to chase stragglers than it is to personally convince everyone that they should change how they operate.

But you don't need to convince everyone personally, because the second approach you can take is to find and empower champions.

If the improvement that you want to make is even vaguely palatable, and you're even slightly effective at communicating it, other people will want to try it out to see if it helps them become more effective.

Find, befriend and then empower those people to go out on your behalf and try to change others. If you get enough of them, congratulations, you've just discovered and leveraged the same thing that organised religion has been doing for thousands of years.

Of course, both of the things above take effort, so one thing I would caution you to be careful of is that you don't spend all of your time trying to create organisational impact, such that you forget to do the job that you are mostly paid for doing.

That won't end well.

Nevermind

Like any good Atlassian who is vaguely senior, I have a couple of things that I am chasing that I think will have organisational impact.

The first is that I'm attempting to drive improvements to the way that largish areas in Atlassian (i.e. 100+ people, 10+ teams) plan and manage their projects. This is the idea of continuous planning, which is something that I've found has worked well for my area.

The second is that I'm supporting an initiative to help engineering teams manage their capacity better (i.e. engineering capacity, for planning project execution). This one is actually pretty interesting because it might be something that other people outside Atlassian can use, which is always cool. I mean, that's how Jira Service Management started, and look at it now.

More generally, I like the idea of everyone thinking a little bit more about how to make the organisation better, though I do worry that it puts too much pressure on people who should be spending more of their time focusing on more local victories.

Still, it's pretty satisfying to cause a big shockwave.

Of positive change that is.

Not fire.