Megan Cook
Megan Cook has led product for Jira at Atlassian for eleven years. Jira serves 75% of Fortune 500 companies and 125,000 customers globally. She leads distributed product teams across multiple time zones and has developed a set of structured practices for building psychological safety and creative culture in remote-first environments.
Key ideas
- Fight Club: a weekly 30-minute dedicated conflict slot with engineering and design leads. Institutionalising conflict prevents it from accumulating.
- The opposite of play is fear: adapted from performance psychologist Ben Crowe (who works with Ash Barty and Olympic athletes). The enemy of product team creativity is the fear of looking wrong.
- Peer feedback groups: small groups meeting every two weeks to share rough drafts before work is ready for formal review. Structural vulnerability reduces the social cost of being imperfect.
- 30% productivity boost from intentional gatherings: remote teams that gather intentionally (designed activities, not just co-location) see a roughly 30% improvement that persists for months.