July 2025 marked my first anniversary joining Atlassian. When I first decided to join the company, people were surprised. Why would someone who has primarily worked at hyper-growth startups join a larger-scale company that had existed for two decades? The decision wasn’t about age, scale, or company stage. There were two areas I was looking for in my next role: leading through the craft of design and re-imagining the application layer experience in the era of AI.

I had a lot of trust that design craft matters with Charlie Sutton at the helm of Design. I was impressed with the continuous improvement Atlassian rolled out with the navigation refresh work and Atlassian Design System. Charlie and Josh Higgins gave a talk at Team ’25 in Anaheim about how Atlassian redesigned its products around a unified navigation and refreshed brand identity, aiming to create a more cohesive, modern, and collaborative user experience. They shared behind-the-scenes insights into the design and technical decisions that brought these improvements to life, inspiring large-scale design transformation.

Atlassian is a company that’s been around since the beginning of my career. It found business success early on and built strong foundations. I wanted to make sure they didn’t hit the innovator’s dilemma. I’ve primarily worked at founder-led companies throughout my career, and it’s my favorite type of leader to work for. In addition to Scott Belsky joining the board, I was very excited about the AI conviction the company has.

I joined in the midst of prepping for General Availability (GA). Jamil Valiani, my product partner, knew this was a must-ship moment and really fosters a startup environment within Atlassian. With the speed of AI changing, we have to. In October of 2024, at Team ’24 Europe in Barcelona, Rovo went GA! This was very much the beginning of our AI journey. At Team ’25 Anaheim, a few months later, we announced that Rovo will be available for most subscriptions with the aspiration to allow every customer to harness the power of AI.

Here’s a list of a few things we’ve designed and shipped in the short time Rovo’s existed:

• AI-Powered Search – Instantly find information across Jira, Confluence, and connected third-party apps using natural language. Rovo Search delivers personalized, context-aware results, including Smart Answers and Knowledge Cards that summarize and explain key information.
• Rovo Chat – Ask questions in plain language and get real-time, context-rich answers. Rovo Chat can summarize documents, provide insights, and even take actions like creating Jira tickets or sending Slack messages. It’s available in the browser, Confluence mobile, and as a browser extension
• Deep Research – Use AI to search, analyze, and generate comprehensive, fully cited reports on any topic in minutes.
• Studio – A unified space to build, manage, and deploy AI agents and automations—no coding required. Studio lets teams create custom workflows and automations powered by AI. ​
• 3P Connectors – Rovo connects with tools like Google Drive, Slack, and GitHub, bringing AI-powered insights and automation to your entire workflow. 
• ​Rovo Agents – Configurable AI teammates that automate tasks, analyze data, generate content, and help with decision-making. Out-of-the-box agents are available for common workflows, and you can build custom agents in Rovo Studio.

Despite all the experiences designed and shipped, our team remains ambitious and hungry to push AI Design even further. There are three key investment areas I’m personally excited about.

The first is bringing consumer-grade AI experiences to the workplace. Most people’s experience with AI comes from their personal use of consumer experiences. For enterprises, matching the quality and craft of consumer AI isn’t just about keeping up with trends; it’s about meeting rising employee expectations, boosting productivity, and fostering engagement. When workplace AI feels as polished and empowering as the tools people choose for themselves, organizations unlock not just efficiency, but genuine enthusiasm and innovation from their teams. Well-crafted experiences are no longer a nice-to-have in Enterprise; they’re a differentiator.

The second area is empowering makers and builders with Studio. I have a close place in my heart for builders and makers throughout my tenure at Webflow, and have seen firsthand what impact people can make when the tools are empowering to people. With Studio, we’re continuing to invest in the Atlassian ecosystem, often without writing a line of code. This means teams can innovate faster, automate the “work of work,” and create tailored solutions that bring the magic and agility of consumer-grade AI directly into the enterprise.

I’m excited to expand Rovo’s surfaces to meet customers where they are. Work happens across various surfaces, devices, and apps; not only in the contained app we’re using. With AI capabilities such as MCP and other technologies, we’re moving into a world where a new MVC is emerging, and expansive surfaces allow different ways to interact with AI.

The team I look after is Central AI Design (CAID). We are the center of excellence for AI and partner closely with teams across the Atlassian portfolio, such as Jira, Confluence, Trello, Loom, and many more. I break down our core work in three areas: Product, Platform, and Practice.

Product is the continued investment in making Rovo the best AI experience in the enterprise. By elevating the experience for AI Search, Chat, and 3P Connectors, we increase the capabilities for other teams to incorporate Rovo into their work.

AI is at the center of Atlassian’s System of Work, a new era of teamwork that spans beyond one persona or department. CAID’s Platform practices include our AI design guidelines, patterns, and working with other teams on how they apply AI to their experiences.

Amongst our design organization, we are all at different points in the journey of Designing AI with AI. Practice is AI enablement in our own org. Our goal is to ensure each human on our team can develop a point of view and understand the material of AI throughout their career at Atlassian. One highlight of this is Joel Unger, Principal Product Designer and long-time designer on Trello, who built a vibe-coded prototype in Cursor, testing breakpoints and generating images with Midjourney.

Why Atlassian Design?

What has always drawn me to Atlassian is the strength of its design community—a network of people like Jennie Yip and the collaborative spirit behind our design systems. Community is essential for design teams because it fosters peer mentorship, collective learning, and the open exchange of ideas. It’s where designers grow together, support each other through challenges, and build a shared sense of purpose and belonging. Especially after years of pandemic-driven disconnection, rebuilding these bonds isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s the foundation for creative resilience and long-term impact.

• Shipping impact at scale – Shipping to over 300,000 customers means every update has a real impact. Our job isn’t just to launch features—we help a huge, diverse community navigate the shift to AI. The scale is massive, but our team moves fast and keeps a startup mindset, making sure our customers can adopt new tools and stay ahead.
• Community – This year, Atlassian Design hosted a series of Intentional Togetherness Gatherings (ITG) globally. We recently wrapped up the tour in our Sydney headquarters building with LEGOs and vibe coding.
• Team Anywhere – Though I love spending my time in the San Francisco office, we’re a remote-first company and proudly Team Anywhere.

Join our team

We have an opportunity to build something impactful for our customers in this next era. Between developer tools, agile, AI, low-code, and no-code, the work at Atlassian is the amalgam of my entire career; been enjoying every moment of it. When it comes to the ingredients of a winning AI Design team, I’m looking for three key areas:

1. AI Literacy – Applied AI experience and the desire to experiment and tinker with the new material of AI
2. Craft – Strategy to pixels leadership—show, don’t tell
3. Talent Density – Central AI Design has a high concentration of talent—excellence at all levels. To work on our team, one must have short toes and collaborate across the product, platform, and practices

We have various roles open across our team based primarily on the West Coast of North America West Coast (British Columbia, Seattle, and San Francisco) and Australia (Sydney and Melbourne).

• Principal Product Designer, AI (Mobile) | United States
• Senior Design Manager, AI | United States
• Lead Product Designer, AI | Australia and United States
• Lead Product Designer, Studio | Australia

Atlassian’s other teams are hiring key roles working on AI too:

• Design Manager, Loom
• Principal Product Designer, Editor Platform
• Principal Product Designer, Teamwork Graph
• Principal Product Designer, GlobeX
• Senior Design Manager, Confluence Core
• Senior Principal Product Designer, Teamwork Collection

I’ll close with notes I jotted when considering joining Atlassian. In any role I consider taking, I write down the end state of impact I’d like to have. I only join if I believe there is a possibility to pull it off. Here’s what I wrote:

1. Atlassian is known as The Rovo Company.
2. Define the winning AI interaction models that propel the industry moving forward
3. Transform the Design Org to Design AI with AI
4. Work with Charlie Sutton to make Atlassian a world-class design team

I’m so excited about the road ahead and hope you are too.