Atlassian’s 20% Time Experiment
I’m happy to announce that we are undertaking a thorough, public “20% time” trial
at Atlassian. If you’ve ever wondered how Google’s famed 20% time works in
reality, we’ll be your guinea pigs and blogging the results for everyone to see.
Why do 20% time?
Atlassian has a proud tradition of innovation. We’ve always strived have market
leading products, our internal ShipIt days keep improving, we’ve won awards for
entrepreneurial innovation and we try to never stop pushing the boundaries in our
business.
So why are we unhappy?
In any startup company, innovation slows as the company grows. Our growing
customer base (we just welcomed Customer 10,000) is forcing us to rethink how
we innovate in our products, whilst maintaining stability for customers.
Wait… so you’re just… copying Google?
Well no – we’d love to (we hate re-inventing the wheel!) but it’s a little harder than
that. We’d love to start from Google’s model and evolve it but that has proven
difficult.
You see, while everyone knows about Google’s 20% time and we’ve heard about
all the neat products born from it (Google News, GMail etc) – we’ve found it
extremely difficult to get any hard facts about how it actually works in practice.
We started with a long list of questions:
