Atlassian’s Point A Announcement is a Game Changer. Here’s Why.

When it comes to evolving their existing products and adding to their product line, whether that’s through in-house development or acquisitions, Atlassian’s approach is both strategic and aggressive: A pattern that’s necessary to keep pace with the rapidly changing needs of technical and business teams. A few examples...the introduction of Atlassian Cloud Enterprise earlier this year, the introduction of Jira Service Management in November of 2020, and the acquisition of Halp in May of 2020. And yet, even by those high standards, Point A is a game changer. Here's why...

Bringing the Most Promising Products to Market to Solve Customers’ Most Pressing Needs

Point A is a product incubator of sorts, designed to bring the most promising products—the ones that solve customers’ most pressing needs—to market faster so that customers can start realizing benefits from them. Through the program, Atlassian product development teams work closely with customers to get feedback. Customers that participate in the program are not only the first to realize value from these game-changing product introductions, but they also get to provide critical insight that helps shape the future of work, in general (and Atlassian products more specifically). 

The initial Point A offering includes five game-changing products in various stages of development, from the Alpha and Beta stages to general availability. They include:

Jira Work Management

Jira Work Management takes Jira's power and reinterprets it to support business teams like Creative Services, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Marketing, Operations, and Sales. It includes out-of-the-box templates for managing common project types for these teams and comes with tons of great ways to view information, including lists, boards, calendars, timelines, etc. And of course, it has a number of essential, built-in reporting features.

You can learn more about Jira Work Management or try out the free version here.

Team Central

Team Central, which is in the beta phase of development, is designed to standardize and streamline status reporting across teams and make it more effective overall. In Team Central, each project has a home page that serves as a single source of truth, and people can follow projects that are relevant to them, or opt out of updates they’re not interested in. 

You can learn more about Team central, add it to Jira or Confluence, or join the waitlist (non-customers) here. 

Compass

Compass is designed to help development teams manage the sprawl associated with distributed architecture. Organizations can use it to get a high-level overview of all their digital services and related information by pulling it into a centralized, searchable space.

Compass is in the Alpha stage. You can join the waitlist here.

Jira Product Discovery

Jira Product Discovery is designed to help product managers build better products. It’s unique in that it’s focused both on the discovery and delivery processes. The tool lets them capture insights and opportunities, prioritize their potential impact, and build support for their plans and products.

Jira Product Discovery is in the Alpha stage. You can join the waitlist here.

Halp

Halp, a conversational ticketing tool for both technical and non-technical teams, was acquired by Atlassian in May of 2020. It integrates with both Slack and Microsoft Teams and essentially serves as a bridge between them and key Atlassian tools. Using Halp, Slack, and Teams messages can be turned into Jira Service Management tickets simply by adding an emoji. Its Answers functionality uses AI to answer questions by pulling information from knowledge bases like Confluence.

Halp is available to the general public. You can learn more about it here.

To participate in the development of new Atlassian tools through the Point A program, you’ll first need to sign up. Participation in Alpha product groups is by invitation only, but participation in Beta product groups is open!