Tanguy Crusson
Tanguy Crusson is the product lead for Jira Product Discovery at Atlassian. In his more than 10 years at the company, he has been instrumental in taking several new products from zero to one, including HipChat, Statuspage, and Jira Product Discovery.
AI & Technology Skills
Prioritize solving the customer problem over platform compliance in the early stages of a new product.
"I would go, okay, we need to win the problem space first, and if the platform is there, let's use it. If it's not there, we'll hack it, test it, iterate on it with customers, and then whatever is good..."
Communication Skills
A successful business case requires a 'Why Now' trigger to move stakeholders from general excitement to active investment.
"I misread the appetite and sense of urgency around that topic... we need a very strong trigger for why now to go after it. And I did not do a good enough job at articulating this. Why now? Why do we h..."
Maintain momentum and protection for new bets through high-frequency, bite-sized internal communication.
"Internal comms is everything there... weekly updates... tweet-sized update... weekly demo of the product and everything that we built. Show the momentum as much as possible... snippets from customer c..."
Growth Skills
Validate market demand using newsletters and landing pages before writing any code.
"Before we brought a single line of code, put an ad inside a Jira newsletter going, 'Hey, we've got this thing for product managers coming up.' And then we had a website that before we had any line of..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Use the 'threat of a reference check' to force candidates to provide more authentic, less scripted answers.
"When people describe an experience, you ask them the name of the person that they worked with back then. And you ask them, 'So when I call this person after our call, what do you think they're going t..."
The success of an acquisition depends more on managing the human 'culture shock' than on technical integration.
"Integrations are mostly about people. They're not about technology as much or product vision. All of that stuff is the easy stuff. The hard part is the people... they basically are joining a different..."
Leadership Skills
Use a structured lifecycle (Wonder/Explore/Make/Impact) and silent reading of 6-pagers for high-stakes product decisions.
"Point A... had four stages called Wonder, Explore, Make and Impact... we basically write a six pager that looks at all the different aspects of all the questions that we're going to answer. And then w..."
Product Management Skills
Avoid 'fast-following' competitors because you only see their past output, not the underlying research and strategy.
"Competitive myopia, don't fall for it... your competitor, if you think of what they do as an iceberg, the top side, what comes out of the water is what they've shipped in terms of features, but it's b..."
Deep, longitudinal relationships with a small group of 'Lighthouse' users are more valuable for 0-to-1 than broad, anonymous research.
"Lighthouse Users Program... we work with 10 and we prove that the problems that they had are the things that we solved... put these people in front of the whole team, not just the PMs, PM, designer, e..."