How Jira Product Discovery Grows

Jira Product Discovery is an archetypal case study in how to build new 0 to 1 products inside an already huge company. In today's report, I reveal the results of 10 interviews into the product + team.

In 2025, there are no shortage of tools sold to product managers.

But you know what? It’s about time.

I can still remember an era when product managers spent all their time:

• Creating roadmaps in sheets

• Creating opportunity solution trees in Miro

• And preparing for product reviews in slides…

It was a mess. I, for one, am happy about the new wave of PM tools.

So, today, I’m deep diving into one of the most successful of them all.

This tool was incubated within a big company (when big companies usually acquire for that) and now has over 14,000 customers.

It is in the rarified air of being built entirely remotely and out of Europe.

It’s a crazy unique story.

So let’s get into it.

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Today’s Post

I’ve been using the product, talked with 6 members of their team, 3 customers, and 2 customers of competitors.

Here’s what I learned spending two months researching Jira Product Discovery (JPD):

1. The Story of Jira Product Discovery

2. How JPD Grows

3. How JPD Builds Product

4. JPD’s Competitive Position

I’m doing a paid subscribers only Office Hours via the Substack app on Saturday at 2 pm EST.

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1. The Story of Jira Product Discovery

Chapter 1 - Point A

The story of Jira Product Discovery starts with Tanguy Crusson, a product manager who had been working at Atlassian on boostrapping new things.

But Atlassian had a high bar, as he explains:

For most business, a $100M business is a home run. For us, it’s not like that. We’re trying to build businesses that grow really big and keep growing over time.

Atlassian was looking for large, enduring problems that could create such a large business.

There had been a good amount of research from their internal teams that highlighted that Jira, Atlassian’s biggest product, was where product teams committed to building things.

However, the discussions about what goals to commit to was happening outside Jira.

So, they knew there was a need. But they didn’t know how much of an appetite there was for buying a solution.

They also knew whatever they sold, they would want to sell via a Jira cross-sell motion.

So they decided to test demand, as Tanguy explains:

Before we brought a single line of code, put an ad inside a Jira newsletter going, 'Hey, we've got this thing for product managers coming up.'

The response was telling.

Within two weeks, they had over 3,000 signups to their waitlist.

This pushed JPD through the first phase of the Point A program, Atlassian’s internal incubator program for new ideas.

They were ready to build an Alpha.

Chapter 2 - From Alpha to Closed Beta

Of course, building an Alpha hardly means success!

As Tanguy emphasized regularly to the team:

Failure is the most likely outcome.

In the time between the first line of code and going General Availability, JPD spent 3 years playing the long game.

During this time, they spent time trying to figure out who this tool would be for.

They ran a bunch of interviews to understand the kind of problems people were talking about.

They used this to create a list of attributes customers wanted help with, and were willing to work with the team to develop.

This was crucial.

Tanguy and team brought together a group of 10 people who they co-designed the app with.

They were very careful with the selection of these folks:

We chose people who were feeling the pains we were going after super strongly, and people that had the agency to change anything about their process. We actually avoided people using competitor apps.

These 10 lighthouse users helped JPD really nail the problem and solution it was solving.

They were going to help teams nail the discovery phase of product building.

Tanguy, acting as product and engineering head, plus a team of contracting engineers built a minimum lovable product.

This propelled them through the Alpha stage of Point A and into closed beta.

As they saw more success within the closed beta, they started to build out the team.

They opened the product up to about 100 users, and they continued to refine and refine.

It was a deliberately staged process so they didn’t get ahead of themselves. They only gave access to people who were giving them lots of feedback.

This helped the team and company not over-invest before they actually had the level of conviction they needed.

Chapter 3 - Open Beta

Finally, they were ready to open up the product for an open beta.

But they still weren’t going to allow anyone to sign up. They allowed anyone on the waiting list to sign up.

This nevertheless led to a lot of growth - and a new, different scale of feedback.

Along the way they learned:

1. The product wasn’t very stable

2. There was lots of ‘mature product polish’ missing

3. A founder of Atlassian thought the product was ugly (and had since Alpha)

So the small team of team 2 PMs, 2 designers, and a dozen engineers put in a huge effort with stability, maturity, and design.

It wasn’t easy, because they had more than 1,000 companies using it.

But they eventually refreshed the product to a high-polish state.

But that wasn’t enough to go GA.

They also had to pitch the data: more than 30% of an account’s Jira users were using the tool.

It was for PMs, but not just for PMs.

The combination of improved polish + great growth potential eventually allowed the product to reach Atlassian’s (very high) bar for general access.

Chapter 4 - General Availability

Of the ~100 pitches that Atlassian’s Point A program had, JPD found itself amongst the 3 who made it into General Availability (JPD, Compass, Atlas).

General Availability is a huge step, because you’re removing the beta label.

You’re not giving the customers the product for free anymore.

You’re charging.

So they gave everyone on beta a grace period, but, after that, anyone signing up would have to go for the free plan or free trial.

There was no more free product.

But it worked. JPD has become one of the fastest growing products of all-time in Atlassian.

Chapter 5 - The Future

What’s next for JPD?

When Tanguy appeared on Lenny’s Podcast 8 months ago, they had 8,000 customers.

4 months ago, they had 10,000 customers.

In today’s piece, I’m excited to break the news (thanks JPD team!) that they now have over 14,000 customers.

JPD is using the amazing work they’ve done in identifying a problem that their existing users would be enticed by and they could solve to grow - fast.

Yet, with something like 300,000 Atlassian customers, they are still set up for a whole world of more growth.

These are the types of products we like to go deep on in this newsletter.

So, now, let’s break down:

• How they grow

• How they build product

• Their competitive position and future