How Atlassian sets remote teams up for success: Mural Imagine recap

Written by 
Nicole Smith
 and 
  —  
November 28, 2020
A headshot of Eugene Chung, R&D Team Coach, at Atlassian talking about going from prototype to play in 4 weeks.

Supporting remote teams at Atlassian

This season on MURAL Imagine, we're bringing you live sessions and workshops to shine a spotlight on companies that have embraced change in 2020. One of these changemakers is Eugene Chung, R&D team coach at Atlassian, a leading provider of collaboration, development, and issue tracking software for teams.

Eugene and his team are invested in helping the 2,500 people in the research and development organization succeed. From process improvements to one-on-one coaching, Eugene delivers advice and approaches to being an effective software team. Some of these approaches are templatized in the Atlassian Team Playbook, a collection of free workshop resources for addressing common team challenges and starting important conversations.

Eugene joined MURAL’s Hailey Temple for a live MURAL Imagine session to talk about one play in particular that helps leaders at Atlassian build empathy within their teams and identify the right support for everyone through changing and challenging work experiences.

Watch the recording below, or read on to learn how Eugene executed Atlassian’s Work Life Impact Play with his team. Then, borrow Atlassian’s template to replicate their success at your organization.


Why remote work is (still) so challenging

At the beginning of the pandemic, many of us assumed we’d be working from home for a few weeks or months, and then life would go back to normal.

“We tried to just keep going as usual, as if things hadn't changed,” Eugene said in his MURAL Imagine session. “A lot of it was also just trying to avoid thinking about everything that was happening around us.”

But as 2020 draws to a close, it’s become abundantly clear that the future of work is forever changed. Being able to communicate, collaborate, and innovate from anywhere is a competitive advantage — but it can’t come at the expense of your team’s well-being.

Being able to communicate, collaborate, and innovate from anywhere is a competitive advantage — but it can’t come at the expense of your team's well-being.


Eugene joined Atlassian as an R&D team coach in mid-March, the same week the company went fully remote work due to COVID-19. (Talk about being thrown into the deep end!) Eugene quickly got to work supporting his new team in light of the unusual circumstances.

“Atlassian commissioned this really large, longitudinal global study at the onset of COVID-19 to understand what the impacts were of this dramatic shift to remote working,” Eugene shared. “How is it affecting not just work — that’s important too — but how is it affecting us as humans, and how does it affect how we relate to each other? And what do we need to be able to actually cope with this dramatic change and the shift that's happening all around us?”

He went on to explain one of the biggest challenges folks are facing right now. “Pre-COVID, there was this harder line and separation between your work life and your home life,” he said. “We can't necessarily draw those boundaries as hard as we were able to before.”

So, the big question is: how can leaders and managers help their teams be more resilient, adaptive, and successful?

Prototyping the Work Life Impact Play

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this challenge. It requires team leaders to:

  • Understand each individual’s circumstances and challenges
  • Give them the tools they need to do their best work
  • Provide them training and support to overcome these challenges

The Work Life Impact Play is a method for facilitating a team workshop that will build empathy among your team and help you uncover the best ways to support them.

Eugene and his team recognize that because of all the changes going on in the world, people are in a vulnerable state. They needed to strike a balance between creating an open forum and making sure no one felt pressured to share more than they wanted to. That’s where prototyping came in.

During the session, Eugene walked us through five iterations of the play to break down what worked, what didn’t, and what the Atlassian team learned from the process.

Prototype 1: Team Anywhere Personas

First, they wanted to help teams be more transparent and communicative. Prototype 1 aims to solve this by, as Euguene puts it, serving as “a user manual for the remote ages.” Individuals could fill out their personas for Confluence or Slack to give visibility into their work environment. 


Key takeaways: The information turned out to be very powerful, but it also led to some privacy concerns. The Atlassian team realized that employees needed more control over where their personal information was shared.

Prototype 2: Team Anywhere Workshop

To solve the challenges with the first prototype, they put together a workshop in MURAL that would foster communication among teams instead of asking people to share with everyone. They looked at three key experience factors.

🏡 Work life at home:
Your living conditions and household influence your remote work needs.

🛠️ Role and workflows:
Your role and types of workflow influence your ability to complete tasks when working remotely.

🤝 Work community
: Your sense of connection to others has a huge impact on how effective you are in your role.



Key takeaways: This approach fostered some excellent conversations, but facilitators noticed a lot of groupthink going on as well. They observed people shying away from sharing their perspectives in favor of agreeing with the majority, which limited their ability to support everyone.

Prototype 3: My Team Anywhere Profile

The third prototype combines solo work and real-time collaboration. Before the workshop, everyone spent 15 minutes filling out their profiles on their own time. Then, they came together to share out their profiles and reflect on commonalities and individual challenges.



Key takeaways: This prototype allowed for both individual self-reflection and team communication. Giving people the opportunity to reflect on their own time made real-time conversations much richer.

Prototype 4: Team Anywhere Workshop

The next prototype served an important purpose. Eugene and his team had scheduled a Work Life testing session with Atlassian’s executive ops team — and they only had 20 minutes to complete it.

Eugene explained, “We essentially had that forcing function, identified some of those learnings, and wanted to test out a new format that brought some of these aspects together.”

First, they gave everyone on the executive ops team their own space on the canvas to work — but instead of filling out the mural live, they could return and add to it later, over time. To make the most of their time, the group spent the majority of the session discussing their initial thoughts.



Key takeaways: The feedback was overwhelmingly positive — and in fact, the participants wished they’d had more time for the workshop. “If some of our [busiest leaders] wanted to do this for longer,” Eugene shared, “it’s a pretty good signal ... that we're not effectively creating enough time and space for us to share with one another.”

The finished product

Based on all their learnings from the first four prototypes, Eugene and his team created the Work Life Impact Play, which you can run with your own team using this template.

5 ways to create psychological safety

This workshop requires everyone to be vulnerable, which can be challenging in any situation — let alone in a remote work environment. Eugene shared how team leaders can create psychological safety during this workshop.

1. Run a safety check.

Before you schedule the workshop, present the idea to your team and make sure they feel comfortable with it. “Do an honest poll and say, ‘How comfortable do you feel running this play?’ You know, are you a one — very low comfort — or a five — high comfort and high desire. And you're asking your team to essentially choose to run this play or not.”

2. Make the workshop optional.

If someone feels uncomfortable or is unwilling to participate, they won’t get what they need out of the session. Even if the majority of the team wants to participate, don’t force anyone to take part if they don’t want to.

3. Set ground rules up front.

Here are the rules Eugene laid out.

💯 Everyone’s experience is unique.

📣 They should share only as much or as little as they want.

💬 There are no “right” or “wrong” answers.

💚 The team will always assume positive intent.

In short, make sure you create guidelines that reduce pressure and give everyone confidence that what they share won’t be used against them.

4. Select a neutral facilitator.

“There are some certain biases that managers and leaders [can] exhibit when facilitating that may not lead to healthy outcomes,” Eugene explained. Not only that, but managers should have the opportunity to participate and be vulnerable as well. “That helps build trust and safety over time,” Eugene emphasized.

To avoid conflicts and unbalanced power dynamics, have someone from another team within the organization facilitate the workshop (and you can facilitate theirs), or hire a professional facilitator.

5. Create an open forum for discussion.

At Atlassian, anyone can join an open Slack channel called #work-life-impact. Folks use it to discuss challenges, share success stories, and grow their facilitation skills. This creates a sense of community and solidarity (we’re all in this together!) before and after the workshop.

When you get it right, you’ll find that this play triggers important conversations and helps you solve problems you didn’t even know existed.

Get Atlassian’s template

Want to run Atlassian's Work Life Impact Play with your own team? Use this MURAL template they created to facilitate the workshop. In it, you’ll find a guide to running the session and the tools you need to make it a success.



Session transcript

Hailey Temple: [00:00:00] Welcome to MURAL Imagine I am your host for today's session, Haley temple, and we're so delighted to have all of you here for, with our special guest today, who will introduce in a moment. But MURAL Imagine is really all about bringing different perspectives from our customers to help inspire you and think about how you can bring.

Visual and digital collaboration into your work. So whether you are an experienced facilitator or you're just trying to solve that complex problem, we are going to help give you some inspiration and even some methods that you can use and bring back into your own work. And today I am so delighted to have Eugene Chung.

Who's joining us to share his story about how he was bringing his teams together. Of course, during this crazy time that we have in the world right now, And I'm Eugene. Welcome. How are you? 

Eugene Chung: [00:01:13] I am awesome today. Thank you so much for having me. 

Hailey Temple: [00:01:16] Yeah. So glad to have you and Eugene, I love by the way, the role that you have, added LaSeon, which is if I have it correct, you are responsible for, kind of coaching and advising teams in your, research and development space around how to be an awesome team and how to work together and providing that one-on-one coaching, anywhere from software engineers all get through leadership. Is that right? 

Eugene Chung: [00:01:41] Yeah, that's right. we like to think about it as just helping our teams continuously improve, across the R and D org. So, the R and D org is essentially last year. any of our teams, product platform teams that work on, delivering our software to our customers.

So it's about 2,500 people across the world. Sydney, [00:02:00] the States, Bangalore. a lot of different offices and, you know, our job is really to help, two things, I guess. number one is help improve the, the larger system, in which those teams operate. but then the second thing is actually on the ground coaching, as you mentioned, 

Hailey Temple: [00:02:13] Great.

So I think some of the advice, and of course the, the play that you're going to share with us today will be immensely, applicable and helpful to a lot of, people who are on the call today. And what I want to invite those of you in the audience to do is follow along with us on, on the screen. If you have any questions, feel free to put that into the Q and a panel on in zoom.

It's probably at the bottom of. Your screen. And what we're going to be do is collecting those questions and saving about 15 minutes at the end of our time for Eugene and I and other members of the MURAL team to answer questions. And then go ahead and share some of your tips or, best practices and stuff in the chat, because this is really a space you guys to connect and learn too.

So with that, Eugene let's dive into the details. So I know you like many of people using MURAL who are on this call today, had an unexpected turn of events when we had to work remote and I'd love to know. well, yeah, of course. What was the challenge? And, and yeah. What are you going to talk about today?

Eugene Chung: [00:03:21] Yeah, I think, you know, even more so, you know, obviously everyone went through this dramatic. Shift to remote working, whether it was around like February, March, or April, specifically for us in Sydney, it was right at the beginning, right, right in the middle of March. and that was actually the first week that I joined, Atlassian when it lasts and completely shifted to fully remote working.

So yeah. I had the, the, the challenge and the opportunity to, to fully onboard, at Atlassian during that time. I actually still, haven't been to headquarters even though it's a few kilometers away still haven't been able to make it into the office. So, you know, I think at that time, a lot of things shifted for all of us.

And [00:04:00] you know, for us specifically at it last year, and we kind of observed over those first couple of months, Was we tried to just keep going as usual, right. try to like pick things up as, as if things hadn't changed, whether that was adding more hours to our day, or just trying to, to work harder.

You know, a lot of it was also just trying to avoid thinking about everything that was happening around us and allowing that, the anxiety and nervousness of everything that was happening, to, to, to actually seep into our lives. I think that's the dramatic shift that's happened. Now it's like pre COVID.

There is this harder line and separation between your work life and your, your home life and your personal life, or you, you at least had the ability to make that choice. Right. It's like the choice is yours to say, well, I'm going to compartmentalize and put my, my home life into this box. And then when I get, when, when I go to work, then I'm someone completely new.

I can choose a new identity or it can, think about different links things and focus on different things. but I think now, and last thing I should cover mission this really large longitudinal global study, on the onset of, COVID-19 to understand what the impacts were. Of this dramatic shift to remote working, how's it affecting?

Not just work. And I think that's, yeah, that's, that's, that's important too, but how is it affecting us as humans and how does it affect how we relate to each other? and what do we need to be able to actually cope with this dramatic change and the shift that's happening all around us. and as part of that we learned was that, you know, and post COVID 19 land, like yeah, like we can't.

Necessarily draw those boundaries as hard as we, as we were able to before. you know, I can definitely attest to that as someone who works out of my own bedroom, sometimes with my wife, who's also actually also an Atlassian and the two of us are working, you know, out of our own bedroom. It's harder to draw those lines of like, yeah, this is, this is my work life and this is my home life.

I literally cannot separate, you know, those two lines and, you know, I think that's something that a lot of us. You know, especially now that we're [00:06:00] like seven months in to this transition are now starting to realize that this is actually not an aberration in that we're not going to go back to how things used to be like, this is yes.

Some something that's, that's actually here to say and something that we just actually have to adapt. and, prepare specifically in my role as, as a team coach prepare teams and, and, our organizations for, to be able to yes. Like be more resilient, but be more adaptive, to, to be able to cope with that change.

Hailey Temple: [00:06:27] Yeah, absolutely. I definitely understand the dynamic there. Cause my, my fiance and I are literally facing back to back or face to face right now, but are desperate facing each other. And it's like, how do you navigate and manage that relationship both with your home life and then thinking about connecting with your team.

Now, I want to, I think no matter what organization you're part of, you can definitely understand the challenges of, of. Getting to, navigating that new space. Now, what now you said you've never been to headquarters. It's pretty close to where you're working. can you give a brief overview of like, I mean, for those who might not know it lasting, I love a laugh.

We use the last name tools all the time, but, What was it last seen like before? And how was it working at it last year before then? I know you just joined, but like, what was the environment you were coming into and also, I mean, was neural and visual collaboration, part of the practice before you, you started.

Eugene Chung: [00:07:22] Yeah. So, last scene as a whole, as an organization about 5,000 people worldwide and it's growing very rapidly. you know, and so each different, office location has its own different vibe, and, and own, essentially a way of working, you know, teams, are pretty autonomous in terms of how they actually do the work.

So they're able to use the tools and identify what, what they actually want to work from. and. You know, I can speak for Sydney specifically. A lot of the office in Sydney, which is our biggest location, you know, was in the office. so we, we do have a lot of remote and fully distributed teams, but a lot of the ways of working were [00:08:00] grounded in being able to actually work face to face or work side by side and, be able to, to physically collaborate with each other.

And so. When we shifted to more remote working, you know, something like a mural, the, the ability to, try to get as close as you can to that experience. But at the end of the end of the day, yeah, it may not be exactly the same, but trying to maintain those elements of, you know, like visual auditory and kinesthetic types of collaboration, you know, really important, you know, like to be able to, to bring people together and, and effectively collaborate with each other remotely.

Hailey Temple: [00:08:34] Yeah, I'm curious. And I would love to ask our audience too. If you can add in the chat, what are, you mentioned some of these collaborative challenges for audience. What are some of the challenges been for you guys working together with your teams? So maybe you were like the Atlassian team working in the office side by side, and now you're remote.

What are some of those challenges? Then, and I'm curious to see if maybe you can offer some advice or things like that at the end, during the Q and a, but, as those answers are coming in, so we have kind of an understanding of, and thank you for sharing. So the last scene was very autonomous team, kind of, different individual cultures, but also a global company.

So you're in. Australia, but you have, you're working with thousands of people around the world. So, how did your team go about thinking through kind of this remote work impact and the work-life impact and, making what we're going to talk about today, which is this play and vote, first of all, what is it play?

And, and how did your team go about solving and making one. 

Eugene Chung: [00:09:38] Yeah, I think the way that our team attacked it was, was in a couple of ways. I think number one, you know, we focus a lot on just getting, the right tools and the right templates to our teams and being able to equip them with what they need, to try to reduce the cognitive load, on our teams to be able to, to create these things for themselves and, and almost, you know, make it easier for them to, to run whether it's run [00:10:00] plays, or, you know, do different practices, to advance their teams, you know, remotely.

So I think that was number one. It's like the practical stuff. And I think that's, that's what we immediately jumped to. It was like, Oh, well, are we set up from the T from a tool perspective, from a systems perspective, from a template perspective? I think the most important thing is actually focusing on these like almost new and emerging skills and competencies that we need to more effectively work remotely, and work during this time, especially in this year of 2020.

And I think these new skills aren't necessarily things that. Tools can give you, or that systems can give you, you know, have these skills, of like true empathy, of being able to understand each other, being able to, adapt with each other and like really get to this point where you have this like, deeper sense of trust and connection with your team.

This is resilience, on teams, like those are the skills that, that we're trying to build up now. You know, and so previously in the first few months of the pandemic, it was like, okay, let's, let's rapidly get up as many templates and tools as we can. And now it's like, well, that human sense of competency is what we're focusing on trying to build up.

And so like now that we're transitioned to remote work, I think that was the opportunity that we saw was that, you know, the answer to this, like how might we help teams manage work life impact. There's actually by focusing on more of. Those new skills, the new skills of, empathy and building, understanding with each other.

So in order to do that, we saw an opportunity to create a new play, to be able to, to meet that purpose. And, you know, for, for full context, the Atlassian team playbook has a publicly available, such as a website, but it's 45 plus. of our tried and true and tested plays, that we use every day internally across LaSeon, that we're giving away that we give away for free.

And they're all about improving teamwork, and the effectiveness of teams, it's available for anyone to, to jump on or something that you can do after, after the session. but I think besides just plays being essentially like recipes for how to do something, you know, I think I see, plays being the secret [00:12:00] weapon.

For behavior change, you know, it's almost, being able to give, teams and leaders, an easy way for people to try on new behaviors and, ideally new things, new ways of doing things we can, you know, help them. Behave differently. Yes. But also over time, change their mindsets and how they approach it.

So know, I see a plays as a really important tool to be able to build up those new skills, that I just talked about that teams need to be more effective in this remote content. 

Hailey Temple: [00:12:30] Yeah, that's great. and I'm curious that your team's working remote, you're trying to help your teams that you're working with the R and D teams are working remote.

So, If you can. And the play that we're going to talk about is the work anywhere plays. So yeah, let's walk through a little bit what this play looks like. And in, maybe also like the process that you guys used a prototype, we're going to show you the prototypes in a moment, but, how did your team do some prototyping?

Eugene Chung: [00:13:00] Yeah, when we're prototyping, again, it's not just about the template or the tool that we're creating. And I think that's probably the first takeaway for sure. You know, anyone on this call who's, you know, creating their own plays or their own templates. you know, yeah. The template is one part in designing that really well is, is, is a good starting point.

But I do think it's about how these tools, the interactions around the tools, the conversations around those tools and the larger environment. It's like how those things all come together. to, to create a successful outcome, you know? So like being able to prototype those three aspects, you know, it goes beyond just designing something in MURAL.

It's actually about, you know, for us internally to get to the confidence. That a play could actually be shared with, with, not just internal teams, but also external teams is, you know, being able to look at all three of those things. And, we call it essentially dogfooding, these plays, but, you know, vigorously testing, these plays with our internal teams to identify whether we're getting to a positive outcome.

And [00:14:00] whether we have the confidence to be able to share this with other people, like, are we solving the actual problem and are we getting to a good result? Are we doing harm? You know, I think that was a huge concern, you know, in all of this. And I'll talk about it a little bit, but, you know, within this environment, you know, we wouldn't want to create something that would lead.

To people feeling like they didn't have control or they didn't have their sense of privacy. Right. So he didn't want to put people in more vulnerable positions that they already were. given everyone's already been in many vulnerable positions throughout this year. 

Hailey Temple: [00:14:32] Yeah. That's wow. Yeah, that's a lot to unpack and like, think about addressing too.

[00:14:38] And I'm just reading through like what, a lot of the challenges that you're highlighting the audiences. So Gabe said it's difficult. Onboarding a team and onboarding, contractors reset, zoom fatigue. building those human competencies are challenging in a remote setting, chatting with colleagues is, and having those, that empathy in that experience.

So what I'm going to do is why don't we jump into the process of prototyping. and the prototypes that you built and I'd love to have you walk us through that journey that you took. So with your team and kind of dogfooding the approach. So I'm looking at number one, I have a mall over here. So what was the intent behind this first prototype?

Eugene Chung: [00:15:20] Mm. So I mentioned the, the global research that we did, and part of that research was kind of highlighting these three aspects of, of work-life, impact. So essentially areas that we've been impacted by, and you know, where you sit in these three different areas, we'll essentially, help you understand how you've been impacted and also how your teammates can best help you.

So those areas are, you know, the idea of like your household, like where you work, and what that looks like, your role. And also the, the quality of your network. So who are the people that you have access to, to, to support you? So I think we already had a basic premise of what mattered in this context and what we could actually build on, this first [00:16:00] prototype.

So I'll walk, I'll walk us through like essentially four prototypes and then walk through the final thing. And this is more just to share learnings and, and ways that, we were able to identify what works, what didn't work. so the first prototype was very early on. and the idea was. That we're trying to solve for the problem of just creating more transparency and communicating.

How you've been affected by this change and we made it very personal. So, you know, what you see here is what we're calling a, essentially a team anywhere persona. but this is almost like a, my user manual for the remote age. And on this profile, you can say like, Hey, this is my name. These are my hours.

This is what my home looks like. And just kind of talk about yourself, but also share where you sat around these three different areas, what you struggled with and what you need. to be effective. and so this was the first version that we tested, and the idea was that you could use this, profile or this persona and put it onto confluence or shared on your Slack and, you know, essentially have anyone be able to see, where you sat on these areas, to, to get further visibility into what your situation was like.

When we started testing this format, I think it became increasingly apparent. That, yes, something like this is really powerful, but, people were very concerned about how this information was being used. So who am I sharing this information with? how's that information going to be used? do I have control over who gets access to this information?

Because yeah, I may want to share it with my teammates, but I don't want anyone within the organization be able to see like what my household is like, you know? And so starting to realize like, yes, like these are deeply personal topics and you know, that sense of control a sense of privacy is really important.

So that's a, that's a key learning that we took away is to, to be able to give people that control and 

Hailey Temple: [00:17:43] choice. Nice. And that absolutely that's valid, especially thinking about different. I mean, the privacy concerns and things like that across different teams and different attitudes about that. Right. So, so your team kind of took this [00:18:00] learning dog food and this approach.

And, how did that inform the second prototype? I'm just scanning over here to number two, which yeah. Huge difference. How did it, how did we get it? 

Eugene Chung: [00:18:09] Yeah. Huge difference. So thinking about, You know, the learnings from the last time I control and also trying to keep, the communication to a smaller radius.

We thought about how can we actually just set up, workshops, almost like a retro style format, being able to do this activity together. Right. So, we called it the team anywhere workshop. And as a team, you would go through those three different areas of like my work life at home. What does my role look like?

And, you know, what does my community look like? What's my support network look like, and you would map it as a team. so everyone would get a blue dot on their own and then you'd be able to map it together. And then we did kind of like a retro format of like, what are the things that help you be more effective in this area?

What are the tensions. and be able to share that and then have the conversation. So what was powerful about this retro format was like the team had really juicy conversations about, what they were going through, what was working for them, what wasn't. but I think even though that conversation was very rich, There's a fair amount of, social hurting essentially, of like essentially the team gravitating towards each other.

So we started observing as over the few tests that we ran with this format, teams would cluster together, and not necessarily wants to represent their own. Self and their own unique situations, but they would put themselves essentially closer to the team. And we kind of saw that behavior of people like starting off in one area of the map and then kind of moving themselves to be closer to the team.

So, you know, as people were putting that down, you know, how do you ha ha for something so unique, right? And that's the kind of the second key takeaway around all of this is like within this massive shift everyone's experiences completely unique. No one has not been affected. and it's not about comparing, Oh, well, someone whose situation is better or worse than mine, it's actually just saying, well, what is unique about yours?

And how can we support each other throughout all this? And so we [00:20:00] kind of missed out in this format, the, the sense of individuality and that unique sense that, everyone's going through their own thing, but each is equally important to discuss and share. 

Hailey Temple: [00:20:12] And I think it's, it's challenging. Are very in a workshop setting.

It's, you're asking people to be vulnerable, and trying, and I, I love that you kind of did the, the ground rules as a way to help. People feel safe to share that space, but then it is interesting. the beauty and kind of challenge of visual collaboration is that yeah. If you can see what other people are doing, then that has the ability to kind of influence your own thoughts.

Right. so that's, that's I imagine. And I'm curious, see how your team solved that before I jump into the next one, I'm curious, what were these, these little icons all across this? And I was curious, what are those icons for? 

Eugene Chung: [00:20:52] Yeah. So, as someone was sharing, I dropped all these little icons, so I dropped some like, I think some flames, you know, just like something spicy or like really, you know, if your teammates share something like fiery, that resonates with you or hearts to show that, you know, you, you like.

Create some empathy with someone, and like a light bulb for like a new idea that you found. And so, as people were sharing, I was encouraging the team to drop icons on top of their post-its to just show some love. Right. And I think that's the thing about these conversations is like the worst thing in having this conversation is sharing something and then everyone's on mute.

And no one reacts to what you say. Like if you're, if you're vulnerable, right. And you're putting yourself out there and sharing something deeply personal, that's the worst situation that we could put our teammates in. Like we need to react to it. We need to acknowledge what they've just shared. and just say, Hey, yes.

I feel you, you know, I feel that pain or that really resonates with me or thank you so much for sharing. So I think those types of acknowledgements, doing that remote is hard, you know, because of, zoom and all that. But you know, these icons are kind of like a nice way of just like, Hey, I heard that.

Or [00:22:00] yeah, that, that, that resonates with me. 

Hailey Temple: [00:22:02] Yeah, the visual, I love that. The icon, that's a great tip for the icons, like a visual recognition of, I hear you on. I understand. And I, and I'm going through what you're going through and I get it. So that's great. so that's kind of the key learnings were that there was a lot of social hurting, a lot of, kind of influencing of one another's ideas in a way.

So how did that carry into number three? So the next evolution. You still have a mall, 

Eugene Chung: [00:22:30] a mall is back. and the idea was that, we kind of broke it out again and said, okay, well maybe we can do some like personal reflection, and, you know, make the separate, like a separate activity that you would do, but then you would bring it back to your team and share out your profiles altogether.

And so we built out these individual profiles again, but allowed for more personal reflection. And so, you know, similar to the last time you had these, like maps, so you can add yourself to, and then on the right side, one of the things that we want to do in the green was, you know, ask some self-reflection questions, for each area.

But the green boxes represent things that we heard from everyone in, in the research. And the hypothesis here was that we wanted to normalize that. Everyone's going through something and that everyone's going through challenging things. And, you know, I, I saw something in the chat. Someone just said that, you know, you feel like going through this alone, you know, and I think that was the, the idea was like, we wanted to make sure that people felt like that.

They're not alone, like everyone's going through something. and it's, it's more about creating that environment where people feel like they can actually share what they're going through so that we can support each other. and so like the green boxes was like, Hey, here's some thought starters on what, what other people are saying.

You know, it's not just also challenges. It's also what you appreciate as well. Right. So, you know what I value about working from home. Know, I get to see my kids more, or what I find challenging is I find it really hard to turn off and switch off and I'm working more hours. I feel like I'm [00:24:00] burning out.

Like those things, those challenges, those are real human challenges, in the shift. And those are real things that everyone's going through. So want it to try to make that normal and say, Hey, yes, we're all going through this. Like, you know, let's encourage people to share their own unique, experience.

Hailey Temple: [00:24:15] That's great. And. Why? So I think you said, and you're introducing this kind of new concept where it sounds like a lot of the stuff, but in the previous prototypes were real time collaboration. And now what you're sharing is kind of this asynchronous way of working, but then being able to bring that into it.

If I understand properly that you would bring this into a group session afterwards, 

Eugene Chung: [00:24:44] is that right? So you do some self-reflection map yourself almost like a worksheet, and then bring that worksheet to the rest of your team to share out. and I think what you wanted to do is like bacon that own time of just like, Hey.

Like give people space and give people time to just reflect on what they're going through, you know, and try not to rush it, you know, once you get into that workshop format, you know, whether it's like time constraints or time to deal with, delimiters like, you're like, okay, let's get to the thing or, you know, and it's not as easy as that.

So, you know, we're toying around with that idea and testing that idea. I think, you know, what we learned here is like, yes, there's, there's value in, in self-reflection there's value in sharing, not just like where you sit. You know, I think those graphs and the charts make it seem very like a geometric it's like geometry, you know, it's like a, mathematical plane.

That's not, what's important. What's important is like what you choose to share with each other. So I think that's the valuable, piece of like valuable insight that we got from this was like the self-reflection. And like that choice of like, what I choose to share with my team, is really important because that also allows people to still have that control that we talked about in that first prototype.

Great. 

Hailey Temple: [00:25:53] And then your final evolution before the, the everything's always a work in progress. Right. [00:26:00] But it's but, and the next prototype you guys did have was, and I love this team anywhere workshops. So tell us, how did it evolve from this team anywhere profile to this actual workshop environment? 

Eugene Chung: [00:26:12] so we had kind of, a forcing function, which was a testing session with the highest levels of leaders, shit that it lasts.

And so, you know, it's called executive, ops and it's like our, our two founders, my candidate, Brooke Scott, far CWA, and like all the heads of product and, you know, all the heads of technology coming together, to, you know, like run these types of sessions. And we, we, we had set up a session beforehand to run something with them.

And so. We essentially had that forcing function, identified some of those learnings and wanted to test out a new format that kind of like brought some of these aspects together. we also had a very short time box to work within, so it was only like a 20 minute testing session with them. So we had to make some decisions on what, what was important.

And so what we went with here was essentially, giving everyone their own personal space. So you see, like Amy has her own area, she maps herself, over time. Giving people that choice in like that sense of individuality, but then most of the testing session with exec ops was about the discussion. What was powerful about the discussion?

The feedback that we got from these leaders was like the only feedback was that they wanted to do this for a longer period of time. You know, they're disappointed that they didn't get to do it for an hour or like two hours. And I think that's kind of showed, if, you know, some of our most time poor, like leadership actually wanted to do this for longer at it's actually a pretty good signal for us that there's value in that conversation that, in the busy day-to-day that we have, that we're not effectively creating enough time and space for us to share with one another.

And have these types of conversations that are so important to understanding where we're coming from, what we're going through now and how we can support each other. So, you know, that was the light bulb for [00:28:00] us was like, Oh, that's really powerful that, you know, we're getting that signal from exec ops.

Like, Hey, we need to create more time in space. You know, we can't just force us into like a, a small, a time box. We actually need to, you know, carve out enough of that time for, for this to truly be effective and valuable for our 

Hailey Temple: [00:28:17] teams. Right. And I think going back to what something you meant you touched on earlier that, that.

Is that MURAL as a platform becomes a space for people to kind of navigate and kind of process that. But then it was really like the richness of the discussion around this for the executives was, was the big highlight for, for you. And also of course, for the executives who needed that space and time. So, I think that's an important thing to think a good tool is it's a tool or a platform or software is helping get towards that outcome.

But creating this visual map helps, helps get there. Hmm. So now you have these four iterations. And so now we have the play ready to share. and for those of you on the call, you'll get this template from, Eugene, the elastane team after this session. And we'll be happy to share the link, but what, and that feeds four iterations.

And you did this in a really short time span. I mean, how, what's this talk us through this final, what you finally produced to. Share as a play. 

Eugene Chung: [00:29:21] Hmm. Yeah. So we wanted to, get something in the hands of our teams, pretty quickly. so once we were able to understand the research that was coming out of our research team, and be able to weigh in on these insights.

And we had to like at the initial idea of like, Hey, well maybe how might we as like support teams through all of this? it took us about four weeks to like, rapidly. Yeah, prototype the first version, but I continuously test and iterate. So it was a pretty, it was a roller coaster, of, of, of those four weeks getting to, something that we felt confident in.

And we're able to, through a lot of these testing sessions, gather those learnings, run enough sessions and say, you know what? We actually feel like this is good enough for our teams to [00:30:00] use. and then once we have enough of those teams, Had you said we'd actually felt like, yeah, maybe this is something that we could actually share.

So this is the work-life impact play, has everything you need to, to run, this play. it's also on the Atlassian team playbook. if you want to check it out there as well, but it's every, it's all contained within this mural. And I think I won't go through the full template here. I'll go through like the top three things that I'd highlight, you know, I think number one, you know, for this template, like setting the stage, especially when you're asking, participants in your team to be more vulnerable and to, you know, actually like share somewhat yeah.

Really personal information if they choose to is to really, be clear on the purpose. Like, why are we here? And provide. Those like guard rails for how, how you're encouraging the team to interact with each other in that space. Right. So right here, right off the bat, we've got the purpose, which is all about building empathy and identifying how we can support each other through all of this change.

But then the S the workshop roles are, an expression of vulnerable ability in and of themselves. So, you know, as a facilitator, I would say, you know, like these rules are really in place to make sure that we have as, as effective a time as possible. But the number one thing I want to acknowledge is that everyone's experience is unique, right?

No one is not impacted in a major way based on what we've just gone through. Like, Yeah, everyone's going through these massive impacts. So I want to acknowledge that at the beginning and actually just say, let's, let's appreciate that everyone's experience is unique, and you encourage them to share and you encourage them, to assume positive intent and that, yeah, there's no right or wrong in this space.

Right. one of the roles we had early on was like, There will be no negative consequences, but there's not, that's not actually something that we can promise to people it's like, you know, especially, you know, if this goes, yeah. Even within the [00:32:00] last year, but outside of it, lasting at this, this could actually be used in different ways.

One of the things that we, put into the play, if you check out the website is what we call it. Safety check. So as preparation for this play, we're not actually encouraging all teams to run this play. You know, so, we, you can do a, an anonymous poll in Slack and say, Hey team, thinking about running this play, this is what this play is all about.

It's about building empathy and understanding. I want to do a quick safety check and you do an honest poll and say, how comfortable do you do? Do you feel, running this play? You know, are you like a one like very low, low comfort or a five? And that's like high comfort and high desire. And you're asking your team to essentially choose to run this play or not.

And so, we encourage teams to run the safety check before you do it, to get a sense of where your team is at, because if you're not comfortable at all, and you're, you have team members who are ones. Getting into this time and space together, like will not be a successful result. Right. So you should actually feel comfortable.

They should feel safe to be able to share with each other this information, or else. Yeah. Like you're not going to get value out of it. So, yeah, so that's something that we encourage upfront. So I think that's the number one thing is like setting the stage, making sure your team is safe and also has the right, encouragement to interact in this way.

The second thing is, yeah, like making, keeping things personal and making it personal. We've got these like, you know, add profile picture here, but, you know, including faces and, you know, people's photos here, you know, make it feel like your own, and giving people that encouragement to do that personal reflection.

So we've got these like thought starters here is like, what do I need to succeed? What would I like to share? And then something I find difficult. And so when I run this play, essentially, do the first half of this play to allow people to just reflect on their own. There's no con conversation yet. Like you're just reflecting on yourself and how you're going through the change, and writing different post-its to answer these prompts.

And then the second half is really [00:34:00] about sharing. So like really just like giving people their own time and space to, to think about it and reflect deeply. The third thing I like to call out is like, after this like really rich discussion, you know, as a facilitator and like likely in any other workshop, what you're doing is trying to get to a result.

You're trying to get to action. Who is going to do what by, when, what can we take out of this? well, who's going to do the next step. Like how do we move this forward? What I encourage facilitators if you're trying this with their team is to not necessarily have that mindset. And if you're having a rich conversation, like be okay with just like having the conversation versus forcing, you know, jumping to, actions.

So if, if you don't get to actions, I think that's perfectly fine. You can kind of just like. You know, like have that rich conversation, maybe set up a followup to, to go through the actions. 

Hailey Temple: [00:34:49] Great. That's awesome. Thanks. Thanks for sharing. And I think people in the audience eager to get their hands on this, on this template as well.

And in the last couple minutes before our Q and a, I'm curious, about what were some of the key learnings that you and your team had? You said you rapidly tested and prototyped in four weeks, which is awesome to be able to move and test so quickly. So what were some of those key learnings for you guys?

Eugene Chung: [00:35:15] Yeah, I think these are just good takeaways for prototyping and yeah. And also if you're, you know, creating new templates or new plays for your team, you know, I think one of the benefits of working on neural was that we're able to, you know, really rapidly like co-design, we were able to test these plays together and be able to iterate very quickly.

So we'll be able to debrief with each other, unpack the learnings, like what insights we observe, how are people behaving? right on the mural itself and be able to use that feedback to be able to rapidly change, the prototype. So, and we were able to go through a lot of different iterations in that way.

I think number two, it was like once we actually landed on a solution, we're able to scale it very quickly and get it in the hands of lots of different teams. I think that's, that's all possible through, you know, these types of digital tools like MURAL, [00:36:00] but, be able to get to that place where you do have confidence.

You're able to feel like you have. solve that initial problem that you set out to solve, and be able to, yeah, equip teams with, with those tools. and third is, really creating enough space to explore like different potential ideas and solutions. So not just jumping to that first have on how that, that tool or that template could actually look, but, you know, Actually destroy, like get, get rid of, or very, liberally kill off some of those ideas that you had at the beginning as you're learning new things, you know?

So, you know, working within MURAL, like you're not tied to anything like nothing's precious, like everything can be changed very easily. So it allows us mindset of like being able to throw away your ideas. being able to test a lot of differing different competing. Potential solutions without feeling too married to one or the other, and ultimately just moving forward and having confidence in the right solution.

Nice. 

Hailey Temple: [00:36:59] That's great. And that is great for prototyping in general. Right. But especially just knowing that, having that space to, to connect and collaborate, especially in the global team was, was awesome. And so what were some, I mean, coming out of the session, some of the results that you, you talked about, like being able to have more space for discussion, maybe people realizing that.

And I guess, like what, what was success for your team? Hmm. 

Eugene Chung: [00:37:24] Yeah. I mean, success for our team was yeah. Like, you know, one way we could have looked at it, I guess was more of like a scale, you know? So how many people, around the world are using this play or how many people have come to the website? that's less important for us, you know, as a team, you know, I think the real impact that we wanted to create was, you know, are we able to create, these different types of interactions where empathy and like shared understanding and like connection.

We're able to take place. and so we run a lot of feedback surveys after these plays with our teams. On whether, it was an effective use of time to be able to get to the outcome. I think [00:38:00] that's what matters to us. And, the feedback internally, has been resoundingly positive. you know, I think the number one way that we can improve the play that the teams say is that they just want more time.

It's like they say, yeah, Hey, we ran, we spent 90 minutes as a team we're constantly on zooms all day. We're, you know, we have two more meetings than we actually need. But we had, we would have actually liked to spend more time on this. And I think that, that, that, that that's a Testament to, I guess, the value of being able to do this, but also.

A signal that our teams don't have enough time and space to create that connection with each other, to be honest with each other and to share where we're all coming from and how we're being affected by what's happening around us. So, you know, I think that's, that's amazing feedback and we're seeing, a lot of our leadership's intern leadership teams internally use it.

And then realize, Oh, we need to be running it with more of our teams and we kind of see this cascading effect. So, you know, we'd love to measure the success of this over the long term, not just thinking about like, Oh, what's happened in the last couple of months since we launched it. but yeah. Are we able to build up those new skills, those new competencies of, empathy and resiliency and, and being able to adapt to each other and being able to better support each other through, these constantly changing times.

Hailey Temple: [00:39:17] Yeah, absolutely. And that was, I'm just thinking too, you mentioned being on a measure that impact over time. And of course, I imagine as, as the months go on with the pandemic and different dynamics changing in the teams, what does, what's next for you as a coach and for the R and D team thinking about addressing challenges, through prototyping or through visual collaboration?

Eugene Chung: [00:39:43] Hmm. Yeah, I, We've got so much work to do. And I think that's, that's definitely true for us as coaches within Atlassian, but also for us as a community of practitioners who are trying to help him help drive improvement on our team. So whether you're a manager or just an individual contributor on your [00:40:00] team, I think all of us have a lot.

Have room for improvement ourselves and especially in the shift to remote working, you know, it last year. And I mentioned it earlier, like made this promise to its employees that we'll never have to work from the office again. So it's called like team anywhere. So as part of team anywhere, you know, how do we continue to, help our teams adapt?

And, you know, take on these new tools, but build up these new skills and competencies for the future. Right. and, I think that's the word that, that I'm most excited about is being able to build out, you know, yes. The T the, the digital toolkit or their Mo tool kit, but also work with teams to be able to build up those, those new skills.

So, yeah, I think. Whether it's like new plays, you know, new, new tools, and also ways to, to build up those new competencies are things I'm super excited about. And, you know, can't wait to see what else comes out from the community as well inside of Atlassian. 

Hailey Temple: [00:40:53] That's great. Thank you. And I guess my one more question, I'm curious that that like something that sparks my mind, cause you're talking about new competencies and these new skills and needs, where, and I know MURAL is, is really.

A mechanism to help with certain new competencies, but where do you see, platforms like neural in terms of collaboration or working visually, where did it in the mix does that come for you 

Eugene Chung: [00:41:19] in the teams? I think, you know, when we think about effective collaboration, you know, one of the first building blocks is just being able to communicate with each other, you know?

And I think knowing that. There are a lot of different learning styles and communication styles. Something like MURAL is kind of the thing that allows us to even the playing field. You know, I think just hopping onto a zoom, meeting your bias towards people. Are you you're, you're, you're creating an uneven balance that suits the needs of people who are able to talk.

More than others and, and, you know, communicate, verbally better than others. and I think, you know, someone who's more visual and [00:42:00] kinesthetic like me, you know, I think MURAL is like that perfect place where I can actually make sense of what's happening. I am not a great listener. You know, I, I have to actively work at my listening and, you know, something like MURAL, words, visual, and, allows you to make connections and move things around and, and, you know, have that.

Sense of connection to it. Like that makes it more visceral and that makes it, that makes sense. Me be able to participate and collaborate with my teammates. So something like that I think is really essential in that, in that future that we just that's 

Hailey Temple: [00:42:31] great. Awesome. Well, I, I know you and your team are going to have a lot of work ahead of you to develop those competencies.

And of course, I'm your own, we're here to help you succeed with your teams. So I appreciate you sharing your story so much. And I know we have tons of questions from our audience here, especially from a, this is an important one from Gino says, hi, that is an important question. How do we become as cool as Eugene?

So let's, let's, go through and answer some of these. And I think what I'll do to Eugene is defer to you. If there are specific questions that you, well, I'm happy to tag in and answer some of those as well. maybe let's start with. in terms of let's start Gabriel Freeman in the challenges section.

So how do you get, how do you get context to get rolling in a company built around in-person tribal knowledge? 

Eugene Chung: [00:43:23] How do you get context to get rolling? Yeah. Without understanding the context of that question. you know, I'm assuming Gabriel's coming from a really large organization that has, I guess, pockets of that tribal knowledge.

You know, I think especially within the re remote context, it's really hard to understand. Well it's happening in those pockets of teams. you know, I can only speak to a few things that Atlassian uses, but we do use like organization wide, you know, team surveys and things like that. And I think those are only as good as your ability to act on them.

So, you know, if teams feel like nothing's going to change, if they give up. Input into those surveys then? Yeah. Like the, the input isn't going to [00:44:00] be that rich or valuable or honest or open. So I think, if you have things like that, then, I would marry those with, actually seeking out those people, seeking out those pockets, you know, whether it's, interviews or workshops.

Know we definitely have a few formats that we use to be able to, you know, within a 90 minute period, not just help teams go through, like things like a retro, but be able to collect. Happening across the organization, be able to ladder those up to maybe some of those like system level, challenges that we're kind of all facing on.

All of our teams are facing and be able to try and do something about it. So, you know, I, I, that's a such a juicy question. you can't go too deep into it, but hopefully that, provides some thoughts or is there, 

Hailey Temple: [00:44:40] yeah, I think this actually ties really nicely to a. To a question. I mean, thinking about plays at a LaSeon because Christina was wondering if the plays that you're talking about and maybe like getting some of that knowledge or sharing some, some of the information, it might be vulnerable for some people.

So I don't know if you, if you have the playbook memorized, but are there a couple of plays that you can think about where, it's a team said we're not ready for, to do that kind of this play yet. but maybe something a little bit. At surface level before you dive down deeper. 

Eugene Chung: [00:45:17] Yeah, I think that's such a good question.

You know, the plays that we usually direct those teams towards, your number one. I usually have a fault conversation with that. Whoever's leading that team just to understand, I guess, what that context of the team is. but the place that I might direct them to is, number one, like, just a retrospective.

I'm not sure if the team is regularly doing retrospectives, but that's a really good place to start. You know, teams have control over what they share, how they share it. you know, and I think the most important thing is to ensure that yeah, you're doing them. Consistently, but you're able to actually build some momentum and, and you'd really start small and helping to identify those, those areas of improvement that you can actually do that you have influence over.

So I think that's, that's a juicy play to start with if you don't do that already. the [00:46:00] second is more of like Alaskan proprietary play, called the health monitor. And it's essentially a play where similar to a retro, you get together as a team and a self assess yourself against these nine different attributes of a healthy team, and have a conversation about it.

And so that can, you know, help dip your toe in the water people, you know, if people don't feel safe, like they may not be as honest as they might, but at least it gives you kind of that easy way to interact with it. And, an easy and easy play to run as well. 

Hailey Temple: [00:46:29] Nice. Thanks. And we'll, we'll we can.

Find help find the retrospective play for the audience as well. I like this question, from Rita about facilitation. So it sounds like if I understand correctly, you facilitated a lot of these, of these workshops and sessions with these teams. Is that right? 

Eugene Chung: [00:46:51] Yes. 

Hailey Temple: [00:46:52] So do you recommend for a team who wants to run this play, that they do the same thing?

Get a facilitator. An external facilitator or do you think it's okay for somebody who's. On the team to do it and why? 

Eugene Chung: [00:47:06] Yeah. We strongly encourage teams to find an external facilitator. this can be somewhat adjacent to yours team. This can be someone outside of your team entirely. I think what's powerful.

There is that everyone can fully participate. and oftentimes, especially for managers or leaders, if, if managers and leaders are facilitating. All of the place and all the interactions of a team, it can lead to some uneven power dynamics within the team. there's some certain biases that managers and leaders exhibit when facilitating that may not lead to healthy outcomes.

Right. And so if you're looking for, I guess this ability to build empathy and understanding, I think what's essential is that managers acknowledged their role on teams and be able to honestly share express vulnerability. And then also. you know, help others, like create empathy with them, and that kind of helps build trust and safety over [00:48:00] time.

So, I would recommend finding a buddy, you know, maybe you can do swaps, Hey, I'll, I'll run this. If you run for me. and, you know, kind of attack it that way, but you know, starting small and doing your best to, to, yeah. Like if you don't, if you can't find an external facilitator, then you know, maybe making it an option for someone else.

Hey, does anyone on this team? Want to grow as a facilitator or want to practice as a facilitator, like, I would encourage managers to not necessarily assume that you, you have to be the one who's, who's who should be facilitating all these plays. 

Hailey Temple: [00:48:32] Nice. That's a great, that's a great tip and I, 100% recommend that as well.

Because to your point, the bias and everything is a challenging one to address. Reese was wondering if. How are you capturing feedback? So you mentioned you are sending out surveys or, like a feedback mechanism for each prototype. what are the kinds of things that you are evaluating and how are you doing that?

Eugene Chung: [00:48:55] Hmm. So a few different ways that we capture feedback. Number one, at the end of each play, I make sure to carve out like three minutes at the very end to do essentially like a fist to five, like feedback ground. So, you know, I'll say it's like, okay, we're going to do a fist to five. everyone like raise your fist.

And on a scale of like one to five, you know, like how, how valuable was this time? that we just had right now, you know, like how, how valuable was the session? and I'll count down and everyone will show like, Oh, it was really valuable for me, or I didn't get much value out of it. So yeah. I do that.

After every session that I personally facilitate, then I screenshot that and then kind of roll those numbers up altogether, to see how much value has been created. and then second thing I do is issue a feedback survey. It's it takes like two minutes. I'm asked like two or three basic questions, but I try to get a good read on all the teams that we run it.

With, across the organization. And, the third way is that we have a open Slack channel called work-life impact. And you're able to go to the Slack channel and say, Hey, this is a problem I encountered, or this is what worked for us. And, a lot of other people are, you [00:50:00] know, building up their own experience with work-life impact.

And so they run it completely differently and are sharing those juicy nuggets, with other. Facilitators who are super interested in it as well. So, we'll try to get that community of practice going of people who are trying it out in their different pockets and connect those people together. 

Hailey Temple: [00:50:17] Nice.

All right. Is there, are there any, maybe you have time for one more question. You do not let you pick this one. Is there one specifically you, that you went to pick out and, and think about an answer?

Okay.

Eugene Chung: [00:50:35] Yeah, I guess, a lot of these questions have been covered. I would love to talk about Rita's question. So are people, are people willing to share so personal things? and I think Rita, that's, that's a, that's such a big question. And, it's a question that I'd encourage you to seek to understand within your own team.

And your own organization is like, you know, what, what is that ability for us to, to share, personal information? Maybe that's an experiment that you could run, with your own team, something that you could test, and taking that kind of like experimentation mindset, I think will help expose new learnings, like different things that you may not have known about your own team or your own organization.

But it's only able to be learned once you try it. so I can't, I can't say what that looks like for you. I can only imagine, I guess like, where that question is coming from, but you know, that, that would be my encouragement for anyone who's like wondering whether something like this could work is to try it out, and see, you know, run a safety check, try to run the play and, see what you've learned from that.

And what type of outcome, 

Hailey Temple: [00:51:41] awesome. Let me see, I actually think we do have time for one more question. So I actually want to get to Dylan's question, which was, have there been requests for followup templates to further the conversation around work life. So, what you think the, in terms of looking ahead, you're talking about new competencies and new, [00:52:00] new concepts.

Is there another play that's brewing? If you can share, 

Eugene Chung: [00:52:05] not necessarily a play that's, focused on. This topic. but we are starting to move to different, challenged areas at Alaska. And so. I think the first one was like, how do we just create stronger empathy and understanding, on teams, feel pretty confident, that we're getting to the outcome that, that we set out to at the beginning.

And so now we're kind of moving on to other problem areas. You know, the things that we're concerned about right now is this, potential innovation gap, this, you know, lack of, time and space and, and mindset to do deep unstructured. Complex problem solving. So that's kind of the next area that we're tackling is, you know, in a remote driven world where you're constantly on zooms and you have time pressure to deliver, you know, how do you still carve out that space for teams to say, you know what?

Let's just deeply understand. A problem. Yeah. I was trying not to jump straight to the solution or what we think the solution might be. Let's just understand the problem deeper and be okay with maybe the different perspectives and opinions that are shared. but so how do you do that in a safe way on a team and how do you do that so that you can actually get to, not just like more innovative ideas, but better solutions for our customers and, and, people actually use our software every day.

Awesome. 

Hailey Temple: [00:53:19] All right. Well, thank you so much. First of all, to, I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw a little confetti over here to celebrate Eugene. Thank you for joining us. It's really great to hear how you and your team were able to work quickly. And to really scale this, this play across at LaSeon, as in making your old part of it, we really appreciate it.

And this is. One, just one of our awesome sessions that we have from year 11. Imagine. So we want to invite our audience. If you want to keep learning, keep gathering inspiration for ways to use MURAL in your work. Then join us December 1st, where we're going to hear about. making meaning and a paperless world with Zapier, Richard from Zapier.

And if you want to register, we'll put the link into the chat for you to register for all of our MURAL Imagine sessions. And then what we'll do in addition to that is for this session, we will share the recording with you for this session and the MURAL template. That Eugene walked us through today so that you can start using this MURAL template and this play in your own work.

But thank you so much, everyone for joining us today. Have a wonderful rest of your day. 

Eugene Chung: [00:54:31] Thanks everyone. Have an awesome day.

About the authors

About the authors

Nicole Smith

Nicole Smith

Team Lead — Customer Marketing
Team Lead — Customer Marketing @ MURAL. Previously @ Salesforce. Passionate about integrated programs, customer lifecycle, advocacy marketing, community building, and rescue dogs.

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