Roles Aren't Converging, They're Expanding: How Atlassian's PMs Work in the AI Builder Era

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Overview

At the Lenny and Friends Summit, Atlassian CPO Tamar Yehoshua addressed a question they said had come up in many conversations over the past year or two: what is the job of a product manager now? Their answer, drawn from practice inside a company of more than 10,000 people, is that roles are not only overlapping but expanding. Whether a PM should write code or step back and steer the team depends on the kind of product and the phase it is in. They illustrated this with three concrete Atlassian projects.

14 min read
0:47

From "your job is going away" to the AI builder

Yehoshua recalled that a year or two earlier, "everyone was pointing at everyone else's craft" and predicting that it would disappear. PMs told engineers their jobs were going away, designers said the same to PMs, and people were genuinely nervous. They said that conversation has largely stopped. Now the discussion is about jobs overlapping, and about a new role: the AI builder.

Yehoshua described that role as real. Some startups are not hiring PMs or designers but "builders," with job descriptions to match, and builders exist in both small and large companies. They noted that founders have always worked this way, wearing many hats when starting a company. The question for this talk was what that looks like in a large organization. They pointed out that many people listen to podcasts about five-person startups and cannot see how that applies to their own reality. They chose to set aside the engineering side, where teams are using coding agents and refactoring codebases, and focus only on PMs.

2:36

The job is the same; how it gets done has changed

In Yehoshua's view, the PM's core job has not changed. It is still to find product-market fit, build products people love, and make sure the business is one customers will pay for. What has changed is the method.

The first change is the tools, which keep improving quickly. People often ask them how to keep up. Their answer is that you don't, and they doubt anyone can. Their advice is not to believe everything on X, and to focus on what actually works for your customers.

The second change is context. Yehoshua referenced the current talk about context graphs and an "enterprise brain" and said it is very real. At Atlassian, the company built what it calls the teamwork graph to expose the full context of the organization. As a result, the PM no longer has to be the person taking meeting notes, chasing action items, or telling go-to-market teams when things will launch. They gave an example from the previous week. CEO Mike messaged them and a product lead asking when a feature was launching. Five minutes later he sent a screenshot of an answer from Rovo, Atlassian's AI product, and asked whether it was right. It was, and he apologized for wasting their time. Yehoshua's point was that people have access to this information but still need help to actually use it. That is a change-management problem, and PMs have a front-row seat to it.

Rowing or steering?

Yehoshua framed the PM's opportunity as acceleration. Atlassian thinks of a team as a ship heading to a destination, and one way to get there faster is intelligence plus context: the models' intelligence combined with the organization's context.

Within that metaphor, the question for a PM is whether they are rowing or steering. Atlassian ran experiments, organized teams in different ways, and measured output. Yehoshua said the conclusion was "it depends," on the type of product and its phase. They then walked through three examples:

  • a new feature in an existing codebase
  • a zero-to-one product
  • enhancements to a very large existing codebase
6:16

Example 1: Confluence — the PM rows and checks in code

Confluence recently launched two AI-based features. Remix with Rovo lets a user highlight text and convert it into a format they choose. Confluence Slides turns a page into slides with a click. Yehoshua stressed that the team did not just decide what to build. They also set themselves the challenge of building much faster and significantly changing how they worked, which they said is different inside a big company than starting from a clean slate.

The PM checked in code. The PM, Ya, had never written code or used a terminal. Her engineering partner built a harness that made it easier for her to check in front-end code. Yehoshua used this to make a broader point: sometimes you need to partner with someone to use the tools well. Ya checked in 26 PRs in a month, which Yehoshua said was more than most engineers on the team. When asked why, she said there were many UX fixes needed, the team lacked engineers to do them, and she wanted engineers focused on higher-level work. She saw this as something she could do to accelerate the project.

Evals. Yehoshua said they hope most PMs understand that evals are now a significant part of the job. On some teams PMs own evals, on others engineers do. For Confluence Slides, getting evals right mattered so much that the PMs, who had traditionally done them, worked with engineers to convey how they wanted the product evaluated. This produced a 2x throughput in evals. The PMs also used Arize, the LLM platform Atlassian uses for debugging, to find problems in prompts and send them to engineers faster.

Automated design-bug fixes. Yehoshua called this their favorite. Code often doesn't match the design, so the team used the Figma MCP to map Figma designs to the actual code, then had a coding agent fix the mismatches. They could fix around 14 bugs in an hour.

Test creation. Engineers went from spending half a day creating a test to about 10 minutes.

Results. Remix launched in six weeks and slides in eight. Yehoshua acknowledged this might sound long to startups, but said enterprise software has to be compliant and secure, and that work often takes longest. They estimated the work would have taken about six months before AI. Iteration loops with beta customers and internal users were also much tighter.

What made it work. In this case the PM was rowing, because she judged that checking in code was the fastest way to move the ship. The engineering manager gave her a clean, isolated repository so nothing in the larger repo got broken, which Yehoshua called very important. The team also agreed up front on an intentional contribution model. They blurred roles by design and committed to questioning existing processes.

10:16

Example 2: RovoClaw — from rowing to steering

RovoClaw was not a feature of Rovo but a zero-to-one project built from scratch. It began with a PM, Josh, and a designer, Kevin, who vibe coded the whole thing to a working alpha that internal customers used. Once they saw they were onto something, they added engineers. The PM and designer kept checking in code alongside them.

Josh then noticed the engineers starting to drift off track because he was busy coding. He asked whether coding was really his highest-leverage activity. He decided to step back and do what PMs usually do: set direction, prioritize, and unblock. According to Yehoshua, things then moved much faster. They added that his early coding helped a great deal, because he understood the blockers and challenges, which made him better at steering.

Josh also used AI to stop doing other work. Yehoshua urged anyone still writing weekly reports by hand to build an agent for it. Josh built an agent inside RovoClaw that wrote the weekly updates on the project itself, which Yehoshua called "super amusing," and he no longer writes them.

Their takeaway: the PM started out rowing and shifted to steering because the project had entered a different phase. He focused on whatever unblocked the team at that moment, and his ability to contribute code helped him do that.

12:36

Example 3: Jira — steering in a huge, sensitive codebase

Jira has existed for more than 20 years and has a large, complicated codebase. It began on data center and moved to cloud. It supports isolated cloud, FedRAMP, and customizations, and it serves hundreds of thousands of customers that "you can't mess up." In this setting, Yehoshua said, PMs checking in code could be dangerous, so Atlassian chose not to have them do it.

The goal was still to make Jira AI-first. PMs and engineers built AI features to help customers use AI in software development, including rethinking the software development life cycle, assigning work to agents, and using agents seamlessly throughout Jira. From in-progress to shipped, throughput was about 3x the norm, and the team shipped 22 user-facing features in about 10 weeks. Yehoshua described several changes behind that.

Prototyping in the real environment. Prototypes started in Loom. A PM could record the UI they wanted to change, walk through Figma designs with a talk track, or simply brainstorm. Loom could then automatically create work items from the recording. When the PM moved a work item to in progress, a coding agent started automatically. That agent wrote code in the actual front-end repository using a managed agent in the cloud, so PMs did not have to deal with local environments. The resulting code was already compliant, accessible, and in the Atlassian design language. If the team wanted to implement a prototype, handoff to developers was much faster. Yehoshua called having the right prototyping environment key, and "a big unlock."

Triaging internal feedback. Because everyone at Atlassian uses Jira, changes generate a lot of feedback. Feedback and bugs arriving in Slack were triaged by the Jira agent in Slack and automatically sent to the coding agent for fixes, which Yehoshua said saved engineering a lot of time.

Customer insights. The team ran many user studies and used Jira Service Management to review all the videos, gathering more than 900 pieces of feedback. A Rovo agent then triaged and categorized them. Yehoshua said the team was "very happily surprised" by the triage quality, and it told them what to send to engineering.

Here the PM was clearly steering: unblocking engineers, processing internal and external feedback more effectively, and building prototypes set up for reuse. PMs did not check in code to production.

16:24

What PMs do now, and what they've stopped doing

Across the examples, Yehoshua listed new PM activities: prototyping and testing, writing evals, going deeper on customer feedback, and consuming information at a much higher rate. All of this, they said, depends on AI tools understanding the organization's context, which at Atlassian is built on the teamwork graph.

What PMs have stopped doing includes manual updates, compiling research by hand, and creating slides from scratch. Yehoshua said they would love to claim there are no synchronous meetings, but that would be an exaggeration. They believe there are fewer.

17:06

The AI Fluency Index

Startup leaders often tell Yehoshua to hire AI-native people. Atlassian already has many excellent PMs, so the goal is to help them become AI-native.

To do that, the company introduced an AI Fluency Index covering six capabilities. Examples Yehoshua gave were:

  • understanding how to use the tools
  • writing evals
  • automating data insights
  • prototyping
  • having the necessary technical literacy

Each capability is rated from 1 to 5: 1 is "curious," 3 is "capable," and 5 is "pioneering." Yehoshua emphasized that this is not a career ladder but a development tool, a north star for skills that keep changing. The ladder is about outcomes for customers. Atlassian does not expect every PM to reach 5 on everything. It does expect everyone to reach level 3 on all capabilities over time, and to reach 5 in whatever matters most for their team.

AI Builder Weeks

Of the training approaches Atlassian tried, Yehoshua said the one that stuck most was AI Builder Week. Once a quarter, PMs and designers set aside regular work for a week. It opens with external speakers (they thanked Claire, who spoke at the latest one). More advanced internal PMs then teach specific skills to others. Finally, participants do a project applying what they learned, either with their own teams or with others.

Yehoshua called it very successful: more than a thousand people have participated, and more than 120 new workflows built during the weeks are still in use. Each week focuses on one topic. So far these have been prototyping, evals, building agents, and most recently checking in code. After discussing it with customers, Atlassian published an "AI Builder Week in a box" on its website, with the agendas it has used.

Measuring outcomes: still unsolved

Customers often ask how Atlassian measures outcomes. Yehoshua said plainly that the company hasn't figured it out, and that they doubt anyone has. They compared it to the old problem of measuring developer velocity.

Atlassian currently measures PRs deployed to production rather than PRs written. It also measures features delivered, from idea to customers' hands and usage, though they said pinning down when a feature started is tricky. It tracks whether OKRs are met and overall throughput. Yehoshua noted that throughput is often easier to measure for one team than for an organization, so both need attention. Teams run experiments each quarter and the company looks at what outcomes it can measure. They asked the audience to share ideas.

20:58

Closing

Yehoshua returned to their main point: each role is expanding. PMs can do more to get their jobs done effectively and deliver more to customers. They called this the best time to be a PM, described themself as an optimist, and said they expect everyone in the room will still be doing this work ten years from now.