Megan Cook on Psychological Safety, Play, and Building Remote Teams at Atlassian

Megan Cook on Psychological Safety, Play, and Building Remote Teams at Atlassian

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Megan Cook on Psychological Safety, Play, and Building Remote Teams at Atlassian

Source: Lenny’s Podcast Speaker: Megan Cook Date: ~2023–2024 Link: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

Key ideas

  • Fight Club: institutionalise conflict to prevent it accumulating. Megan Cook runs a weekly 30-minute “Fight Club” meeting with engineering and design leads. The session is dedicated entirely to surfacing and resolving disagreements before they compound into dysfunction. The name signals the rules: what is said in Fight Club does not travel; the goal is productive friction in a safe container, not performative harmony.
  • The opposite of play is fear, not work. Adapted from Ben Crowe (performance psychologist who works with Olympic athletes and tennis champion Ash Barty): the enemy of play in a product team is not busyness but fear — fear of looking wrong, fear of wasting the team’s time, fear of the idea being rejected. Creating psychological safety is not about removing accountability; it is about removing the threat attached to offering ideas.
  • Peer feedback groups as vulnerability infrastructure. Cook’s teams meet in small groups every two weeks to share rough drafts and receive feedback before work is ready for formal review. The mechanism is structural: requiring everyone to share something unfinished removes the social cost of being imperfect. Leaders who participate model the vulnerability they want distributed through the team.
  • Intentional gatherings produce a 30% productivity boost. Remote teams that gather intentionally (with designed activities, not just co-location) see a roughly 30% improvement in productivity and connection that persists for months after the gathering ends. For Jira’s PM team, this means three gatherings per year. The implication is not “be more in-person” but “design the in-person moments to create durable connection.”
  • The automation platform miss. Cook’s most instructive failure: the team built an automation feature as a product rather than as a platform, and a competitor later built and sold the exact platform they should have built. The lesson is not about automation specifically but about recognising when you are building a point solution to a problem that the market wants solved architecturally.

Overview

Megan Cook has led product for Jira at Atlassian for eleven years. Jira serves 75% of Fortune 500 companies and 125,000 customers globally; it launched in 2003 originally as a bug tracker for Nokia-era software. Cook describes Atlassian’s product innovation stages — wonder, explore, make, impact, scale — as a gate-and-team system that keeps early-stage products from inheriting the complexity of mature ones. The episode also covers: deep work scheduling (blocking long stretches with leadership calendar coordination), CSAT investment leading to dark mode shipping, the 6-month onsite format for distributed PM teams, and the compounding value of failure stories shared by senior leaders. Cook’s favourite books are Inspired by Marty Cagan and Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. Her life motto is “Maximising joy.”