SERIES / MY ATLASSIAN INTERNSHIP
Week two: a bunch of firsts, and the art of async
Somehow, between reading Confluence pages and attending meetings, I’m already at the end of my second week… whaaaaat!?
So what actually happened?
The exciting part…
This week, we kicked off two projects that will be the core of my internship. The first is a secret shopper-type activity, where I’ll be migrating two instances of our products from server to cloud. I know, wow, big girl pants. New hires usually do some sort of secret shopper activity, it was explained to me, to help cast fresh eyes on our products (in my case, the migration tools) and identify any friction in the existing customer journey. I was told I could make use of anything I needed to complete this project, so… hi Google 👋🏼. Lucky for me, I have a buddy to work with on this project.
The second project is a lot meatier, but I’m looking forward to it no less. I’ve been tasked with conducting an audit of the content in the Atlassian Cloud knowledge base and subsequently producing a content strategy that will help make our troubleshooting guides more findable, useful and… basically more effective. A preliminary glance at the knowledge base tells me this will be a messy task, but I’m also very excited to already be trusted with this level of ownership on what will be my main internship project.
…and the rest of the week, in a nutshell:
- I was given an introduction to the world of content design, the types of copy and documentation content designers work on, and our existing and new writing tools and publishing environments over a few sessions. I was also introduced to writing with Atlassian’s voice and tone principles, which will be indispensable to the work I’ll be doing.
- I attended (an awesome) talk by Steve Portigal, a world leading expert on interviewing users, learning about how to get the most out of customer conversations. Coincidentally, I had the opportunity to internalise some of the tips when I shadowed a usability study the next day.
- I attended my first Customer Experience (CX) and Global Town Halls, retaining about 10% of what was said.
- And last but not least, I met more people: other interns, my boss’s boss (spoiler: she’s a lovely lady), more content designers, and a few other people in the wider CX org.
I don’t think there’s much to see in the details of my day-to-day this week. Instead, I wanted to reflect in this blog on some small observations about working rhythms and routines that I imagine I will be finding my way around over the coming weeks.
Working in a remote team
When I opened my calendar on Monday morning, the first thing I noticed was how calm the start of my week was. “I have… no meetings today?” was my first question to my manager in our 1:1 weekly planning session. Turns out, the weekly rhythm of a remote team such as ours, spread across three timezones, looks a little different to what I might’ve expected in a “normal office job”.
Whereas in my previous team experience we would attempt to stack as many priority team meetings as possible early in the week, working with a distributed team has brought about a few interesting observations:
- Mondays tend to be quieter for Sydney-based team members (like me) as our co-workers in Bengaluru don’t start until our afternoon, and those in Mountain View are still on their weekend. In that case, Mondays are going to be a good opportunity for me to get stuck into some deep work and get on top of the week early.
- Weekly team meetings and sparring sessions take place after lunch in Sydney, in the middle of the week, in order to cater to all timezones. This has proved to be a tricky time for me, forcing a battle between my mid-week attention span slump and the inevitable post-lunch food coma. Though upon reflection, this might be a good time to implement the “stand” part of a sit/stand desk…
- Being ahead of time in Sydney means you finish the week first, which can be a perk or challenge depending how you see it. Unless you consciously check-out (quit/snooze Slack, close the laptop) at a designated time on Friday, I’ve found myself working some spillover hours simply because there are still pings from Slack or I need to get something done.
That’s it! That’s a wrap 🌯 on my week two. If you liked what you’ve read, click here for the next post!
