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Advice / Employer Resources

Employer Spotlight: Devin Rogozinski on How Atlassian’s Team Stays United Around the Globe

Devin Rogozinski
Devin Rogozinski/Atlassian

Here at The Muse, we know that there's no better way to understand how to ace your own employer brand than by seeing some best practices in action.

Well, you're in luck—because that's exactly what our Employer Spotlight Series does. We feature all sorts of helpful advice and insights from companies that are totally crushing their employer brands, so that you can learn from their success.

This month, we chatted with Devin Rogozinski, Head of Talent Marketing at Atlassian to find out how the company brings its story to life on a global scale.


Tell us a little bit about your career journey. How did you discover your current role? Does it align with your background (education or previous work experience)?

I’d call myself a marketing strategist by education, but in exploring where that could take me, I ultimately decided to transition from brand management to the talent brand space. Applying my experiences as a brand manager to the world of recruitment allowed me to keep doing the things I enjoyed about marketing while shifting my focus from positioning products to introducing people to career opportunities. I’ve found it more rewarding to introduce someone to a new opportunity than a new sneaker or video game—even though I still love a good sneaker or video game!


What is one tool or piece of advice you wish you'd known about when you first started working at Atlassian?

Take little bets. A friend of mine had recommended the book Little Bets by Peter Sims a couple years after I’d joined Atlassian. It’s a quick and easy read but has some great insights. If I think about how that applies to the talent brand world, I’m asking myself now: Are there new, low-effort ways to bring Atlassian to life for candidates? Let’s find small ways to test that “bet” and if it works, we can scale it up. If we take a little bet that doesn’t work, that’s okay, we learn from it and move on to the next. Oftentimes, we spend too much time trying to think of the next big thing and not enough about incremental gains.

If we take a little bet that doesn’t work, that’s okay, we learn from it and move on to the next. Oftentimes, we spend too much time trying to think of the next big thing and not enough about incremental gains.


Atlassian has offices in New York, California, Texas, and Australia. How does having multiple office locations impact how you build a consistent talent brand and marketing strategy?

As Atlassian has grown, we’ve had to adapt our strategy along the way. That said, our aim has always been to provide a transparent view into life at Atlassian. The most important part in providing that transparent view and building global consistency is understanding the things that unite our team around the world. For us, that’s our mission and values. Across all of our offices, our mission and values are a huge part of our talent brand messaging.

At the same time, the people and teams in our various Atlassian offices give each work environment its own unique personality, so it’s just as important that we’re highlighting the things that make each space unique. Having an approach that accounts for both globally-uniting and locally-relevant messages is key for us.


What programs and tactics can you use to unite an international workforce?

I’m not sure there’s a particular program or tactic out there that could unite us internationally if we first weren’t united philosophically by our mission and values. But, there are a ton of initiatives that bring us together as Atlassians.

Every week we have a global town hall that’s broadcast in all of our offices and available to be streamed by anyone who can’t make it. Every quarter, all of Atlassian—including remote staff—is invited to team up as part of our internal hackathon called ShipIt. The great thing about ShipIt is that it’s not a traditional hackathon, so it doesn’t require coding skills to take part, it’s simply 24 hours to improve anything about Atlassian and share your work. And, every day people are sharing updates on Hello, our internal wiki built on our product Confluence. All of these programs help us stay connected even if we don’t spend that much time in the same room.


How does The Muse help you tell your company story and engage top talent?

Our people are a key part of bringing Atlassian to life in the minds of candidates. As much as possible, we look for ways to give Atlassians a platform to tell their individual stories. The Muse helps us to do just that. We hire people who share our values and find purpose in our mission, so allowing our people to share the things that brought them to Atlassian in an unscripted way—free from HR-speak—is often the most impactful way to bring our company to life in the minds of future candidates.

As much as possible, we look for ways to give Atlassians a platform to tell their individual stories. The Muse helps us to do just that.


Your team creates content, digital campaigns, and event experiences that bring the Atlassian story to life and showcase what it’s like to work there every day. How do you measure the success of these efforts?

Measuring success is always top of mind, but we get to those success metrics in different ways depending on the project. As a go-to metric, we’re always looking at engagement. We want to know if the messages we’re broadcasting resonate with the audience seeing them. Having spent a few years defining our talent brand narrative, we have a good feel for the type of content that resonates with key candidate pools, but we’re constantly iterating to find areas where we may want to lean in further.


Atlassian's New York City office is the home base for the development of Trello, which was acquired in 2017. What advice would you give someone in a role similar to yours, who has the unique task of aligning multiple brands as one company?

My biggest piece of advice would be not to force outcomes. When Trello joined with Atlassian, there wasn’t a clear cut way to include that team in our careers storytelling in the same way we treated other parts of the organization. Luckily, Trello shared similar values to Atlassian so there was a lot of overlap in how we made decisions, but we had to give it time to merge our recruiting efforts. After lots of conversation, we decided to treat Trello as a distinct team within Atlassian in the same way we might treat Design or Engineering as teams with different needs.


As a company that embraces working from home and is committed to supporting remote employees, what tips do you have for fostering a productive and inclusive remote work environment?

We’re still quite early in our journey to fully embrace remote work. Remote working was a practice Trello had fully embraced before being acquired by Atlassian, so they really helped us grow our remote working muscle. I now work remotely myself and it definitely comes with its own set of challenges. In my opinion, the number one question for organizations to answer is: How are we making sure we’re keeping open lines of communication between remote and in-office staff?

At Atlassian, we all have open access to information through our internal Confluence instance called Hello. The ease of accessing information and sharing updates helps foster a feeling of connectedness.

The number one question for organizations to answer is: How are we making sure we’re keeping open lines of communication between remote and in-office staff?


What is the most rewarding part of your job?

It’s really rewarding to be able to collaborate with people across the Atlassian universe and help bring their stories to life. Not only do I get to meet amazing people and hear about the things they’re passionate about, but I get to turn their stories into video and writing and photography. (I’m making “I” statements about bringing these things to life, but really, it’s “we” because without the teams around me, these projects would never come to life.)

We just finalized a video called Life at Atlassian featuring people from our Sydney, San Francisco, and Mountain View offices, and bringing that to life was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever worked on.


What's something you do outside of work that makes you a better employee?

If I had to choose one thing, I’d say exercise and sport. There’s quite a bit of research out there that suggests there’s a connection between physical and mental fitness. When I go too long without exercising, I start to feel less creative and less motivated, so even when things are really busy, I know that taking the time to go for a run or show up for a game of basketball with friends is going to help me to be more productive afterward.