3. Anu Bharadwaj, Atlassian COO: Leading With Heart and Winning With Execution

In this episode, Anu Bharadwaj shares her tricks of the trade as one of the most impressive product and platform minds we know. She draws on her time at Microsoft, where she launched several products for Microsoft Studio, as well as her current role leading operations for Atlassian, to provide some really fascinating insights. 

• How Atlassian got its start (1:23)
• Anu’s unique  journey from Microsoft to her role as Atlassian COO (3:56)
• The three key things that led to the platformization of Atlassian (11:44)
• The impressive proliferation of the Atlassian Marketplace (17:13)
• The roadblocks and challenges Atlassian has faced with both platform and ecosystem shifts (25:01)
• Is your product right for platformization? What should you consider when making this determination? (30:11)
• Why no strategy is better than its execution (31:13)
• The human side of platform building (32:33)

Guest: Anu Bharadwaj 

Anu Bharadwaj is the Chief Operating Officer at Atlassian. Anu leads transformative projects across product lines at Atlassian, including the enterprise business, cloud platform teams and operations.

An accomplished executive with a track record of growing $1B+ businesses, building great teams and shipping blockbuster products, Anu joined Atlassian in 2014 as the Head of Product for Jira, and has held a variety of roles at the company during her tenure. Prior to joining Atlassian, Anu was at Microsoft, launching several products for Microsoft Visual Studio for over 10 years. Anu is passionate about making the world a better place through technology and effective philanthropy. She is a member of OutSystem’s board of directors and serves as the Director of Atlassian Foundation.

Host: Avanish Sahai

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow. From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase. Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.

About Tidemark

Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale.  Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years.  Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.

Links

• Follow our guest, Anu Bharadwaj
• Follow our host, Avanish Sahai
• Learn more about Tidemark

You can find the the full transcript here.