Point A

Point A is Atlassian’s formal incubation framework for new product bets — a four-stage process (Wonder → Explore → Make → Impact) with explicit gates, shared vocabulary, and organisational protection designed to let new products develop without being crushed by processes built for mature products.

Created in response to HipChat’s failure. Tanguy Crusson and Jira Product Discovery are its most prominent public example.

The four stages

Wonder

Prove there is a market worth entering and articulate why the company should enter it now rather than later. Two gates:

Market proof. Is the opportunity real? Who are the users, what is the problem, is it large enough?
Why now. What makes this the right moment? A technology inflection, a competitive opening, an adjacent product reaching maturity? Without a compelling why-now, the correct decision from any approver’s perspective is to defer — indefinitely.

Many pitches answer the first question well and fail the second. Those that cannot answer why-now get parked; some sit on shelves for years until a team makes the urgency argument explicitly.

Explore

Validate solution concepts with customers before writing production code. The preferred medium at Atlassian is Figma — high-fidelity enough to generate real reactions, fast enough to rebuild in days.

Teams in Explore are not expected to have production architecture reviews, security sign-offs, or marketing alignment. The shared vocabulary communicates this without negotiation: if the rest of the company knows a team is in Explore, it knows not to impose mature-product processes.

The gate from Explore to Make uses a six-pager: a six-page document read in silence by all participants for 15 minutes before any discussion. No slide decks. Founders and product leadership attend. The format resists charm — you cannot present your way through a silent reading exercise.

Make

Build the product through three sub-stages:

Alpha: Handful of known customers by name (Lighthouse Users Program). Engineers attend customer calls directly. Explicit success criteria defined before the stage begins.
Beta: Expand to ~100 customers. Explicit criteria gate the expansion from alpha.
Generally available: Full release. The gate from beta to GA requires design standards to match the platform — Crusson’s GA push was rejected by a founder because the product was functional but visually below Atlassian’s bar. Two to three months of design work preceded the actual GA.

Impact

Monitor and grow the business: acquisition, activation, retention, expansion. At this stage the team integrates back into the normal product organisation. The incubation protection is lifted; the product is expected to compete for resources on normal terms.

What Point A provides

Psychological safety. Teams borrow people from other departments; no one’s job is at risk if the bet fails. Personal risk is decoupled from product risk.

Company resources. Research capability, corporate development, analyst relationships, legal, design — available without requiring the team to be large enough to afford them.

Shared vocabulary. Wonder/Explore/Make/Impact are known across the organisation. A team can communicate their stage once and have the rest of the company calibrate its expectations accordingly.

The failure-first framing

Crusson deliberately communicated to the organisation that the JPD bet had perhaps a 70% chance of not existing in six months. This is not defeatism — it is a firebreak against organisational processes that assume permanence.

Once a product is framed as possibly temporary, the organisation stops imposing permanent-product expectations: full production architecture, legal sign-off on every workflow, marketing roadmap alignment. The framing buys time for the bet to find its footing before the organisation’s full weight comes to bear.

Outcomes

Of roughly 100 pitches in the first Point A cohort, three products completed all four stages. Jira Product Discovery was one — four years from solo research to general availability, 8,000 customers at GA, one of the fastest-growing products in Atlassian history.