Are the many new features released in the Atlassian Ecosystem becoming a problem?

At Team '24, the massive Atlassian event that takes place every year, we got a massive amount of new features, and even a brand-new product. For those of us that works as administrators or platform owners, this means that we have to study up and learn all these new and exciting things.

During the event, co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes presented numbers on how many new features that had been released in the last year. A staggering 1000 features released to customers. 8,000 deployments each month, or new code being added to the Atlassian products every 5–6 minutes.

That is a lot of change.

While we all love to see new shiny things to make the tools we love become even better, I wonder if the sheer volume of changes is becoming a problem? Should we be concerned about this frantic pace, or is it a good thing?

Coordinating change in a complex ecosystem with distributed Agile teams

Working with changes on the scale that Atlassian is doing, where most of the code that is being deployed have multiple dependencies as most products share code and services within the code, requires extreme control.

We have seen quite a few incidents in the last year when this has not been working, and in many of those cases the problem has been connected to collaboration. With that, I am not saying that collaboration is not front and center in the mindset of the Atlassian employees. I know it is, and I think this is evident in everything they do.

Why these things happen is more likely a combination of things. Clearly, Atlassian work at a very high pace, they adopt an Agile way of working which demand high level of communication, and they have a work from anywhere policy. These factors are not easy to combine, and sometimes this can cause mistakes to be made.

I am not sure need such a high pace that Atlassian are pushing now, or if it is better to reduce the number of deploys and feature releases to ensure fewer mistakes are made that causes incidents?

Frantic Adaptation and organizational resiliency

The massive amount of new features do not just add functionality. Sometimes it alters existing ones, or even remove features completely. This causes some issues because not only is it hard for administrators in the Atlassian ecosystem to keep up and learn all these new things, but as changes affects the ways of working within the organization it can cause frustration.

Lacking information provides poor adaptation

One big problem with new features is that they are often poorly described and there seems to be gaps in presenting all the changes. I do weekly videos for all Atlassian Cloud Changes as presented in the Atlassian blog, and I frequently find that the information is either missing, or very difficult to interpret based on the description.

If we are to learn all the new features that come out, then we not only need an information feed that show ALL changes, we also need the information on how these new functions work. Many times it is difficult to even know where this new feature can be found as there are no screenshots and the description is unclear.

Maybe AI can help with the descriptions, but we need a good source of information that not only present the changes, but that we can also subscribe to be notified about. Right now, we have both the Atlassian Cloud Changes blog and the Product Updates feed in Atlassian Admin.

I can't subscribe to updates based on product and the output is very polluted with both new features, things that are rolling out and other things. It would be very nice to have subscription options with in product notifications in Atlassian Admin, but also in RSS form, since some of us old geezers still use that.

Having time to learn on the job

Getting updated on new features is one thing, but you also need time to learn and evaluate the impact of new features. This is not always available in some organizations, which leads to many administrators having to play around with these new features outside working hours.

While this is not something that Atlassian can influence it should be considered as if we don't have the time to learn new features, then they might be unused, or in worst case lead to frustration in the users. With almost 3 new features every day, this is no small problem for most organizations.

Updating instructions and leading the change

As administrators of the Atlassian products, we are expected to provide instructions and leading the change for our users. This is being made increasingly difficult the more features are being released, especially when the features add changes to existing work processes.

While Atlassian provides excellent guides and also provides training for free in the Atlassian University, most organization have customizations and processes that require special training. These are often difficult to keep updated, especially if it is not always clear if a new feature affects something in them, due to the low level of documentation in the release notes.

Organization resiliency towards changes

Most organizations have their hands full providing services and products for their customers. They do not always embrace change, especially if it requires constant change to internal work processes.

Having a product that is always in flux can not only be a problem, it can lead to product change even. So the level of changes have to be balanced between improvements in the form of new functionality that add to the existing processes and changes to existing functionalities that require the organization to spend time finding out new ways of working.

Are we at risk of going too fast, or are we ok?

In a world that spins so fast, Atlassian must keep innovating and release new functionality. The question is just if it is better to have larger chunks of change, like the one we saw at Team '24 where multiple products now merge together into one, forcing rather drastic changes to both ways of working and governance?

Or is it better to have this coming out in the same cadence as we have been for a while, with periodic big drops like at Team '24?

I am not sure, but I do see some growing aches at both organizations with internal teams and with the consultant agencies that must spend a lot of time keeping up with all the changes.

What do you think?