Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
In this series, staff writer Chantal Kapani sits down with the people behind the scenes to explore what makes their engineering culture tick.
Key takeaways:
- Atlassian starts by asking developers what’s broken, not by buying the latest tool.
- 10% of developers’ time is scheduled specifically for fixing build times, docs, and technical debt.
- AI is already cutting friction: 45% faster PR cycles and 51% of security vulnerabilities auto-resolved.
It is tempting for engineering leaders to implement the latest tools on the market in the hope that they will improve developer experience. Atlassian’s approach is different – start by asking developers what bottlenecks and pain points they are facing first, and then respond appropriately.
“Where I see a lot of companies fail is they don’t ask their developers what needs to be improved,” Andrew Boyagi, customer CTO at Atlassian, tells LeadDev.
While developer experience can contribute to employee happiness, its strategic value lies in helping teams work more efficiently and effectively, Boyagi says.
“Speak to your developers, run good surveys, so you can understand what the actual challenges are. If this is about improving developer experience, it must be about removing friction for developers,” Boyagi says.
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Removing friction for developers
At Atlassian, improving the developer experience means reducing the organizational friction that prevents engineers from spending their time on meaningful, high-quality work.
One way the company does this is by giving developers the opportunity to spend 10% of their time improving their own developer experience.
Boyagi sees that dedicated time as an important part of the approach: rather than treating improvements to the engineering environment as something developers have to fit around their existing responsibilities, it’s built into the schedule as its own priority.
“Developers can do the work that they want to do that’s meaningful, that’s high quality, with minimal organizational friction. Deciding what to build, building it, and operating it,” explains Boyagi.
At Atlassian, developer friction often stems from build times, outdated documentation, technical debt, and inefficient processes. Developers can also lose time searching for information, navigating unnecessary processes, and working around organizational bottlenecks.
Giving engineers time to address those problems is crucial, Boyagi argues. Otherwise, improving the way they work simply becomes another task competing with feature development and operational responsibilities.
It is not about giving engineers permission to make positive changes. “It’s more about giving them the space and the time to do it.”
Being AI-first
AI fits naturally into Atlassian’s wider approach to improving how developers work. As the firm began building AI-first products, it also had to rethink how its own engineering organization worked.
“To build AI-first products, we had to become an AI-first engineering organization ourselves,” explains Boyagi.
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Atlassian gives engineers access to leading AI tools and the freedom to experiment through initiatives such as its hackathon.
AI is already being used to tackle some of the more time-consuming friction points in the development process. Boyagi says the company has seen AI agents reduce pull request cycle times by 45% – addressing what he describes as a key pain point for developers.
AI is also being used to take on security work, automatically resolving 51% of potential vulnerabilities.
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“No developer likes resolving security vulnerabilities,” Boyagi says.
The value of these approaches is not simply that they make developers faster. They also remove some of the repetitive or frustrating work that can get in the way of higher-value engineering.
