Contributing to company strategy as a designer: In pursuit of the "unit of work"

Lead designer in tight collaboration with Taylor Pechacek, Group Product Manager, who owned and spearheaded the overall strategy. My role was concepts and articulation — creating the visual frameworks that made abstract product strategy legible and communicable. The concept diagrams were mine; the strategic direction was a genuine partnership.

The Unit of Work was a focused initiative that brought together a small group of specialists from across the business, tasked with bringing clarity to a concept that had been loosely forming organically within Atlassian. The concept being that Jira, as a product, should own the "unit of work" for teams — but what did this mean in practice and how do we start making it a reality? That's what we set out to explore, model, contextualise in user journeys, and then package up as recommendations back to the business.

I created a series of concept diagrams, each addressing a different facet of the problem and mapping to specific user pain points:

Derived vs. Manual. Today, the state of work in Jira requires manual updates. But if the unit of work is connected to other activities — code commits, deployments, design reviews — its state could be derived automatically. This model mapped the gap between how work is tracked (manually, often out of sync) and how it could be tracked (derived from the tools where work actually happens).

Dispersed. Individual attributes of a work item can be decomposed and surfaced throughout the product in contextually relevant ways. Rather than the issue view being the only place to interact with a work item, its data could appear in boards, timelines, dashboards, and marketplace integrations — each showing the facets that matter for that context.

Inlets and leverage. This addressed the marketplace and vendor ecosystem. Why would a third-party vendor want to conform to Atlassian's formalised entity types? What's the value exchange? The model mapped the incentive structure for both sides — Atlassian gets richer integrations, vendors get deeper distribution and contextual placement throughout Atlassian's product surfaces.

Traversal. How does a unit of work relate to things outside Jira? How do users move from a prototype in Figma, to a Jira issue, to a pull request in Bitbucket, and back? This model mapped the cross-boundary navigation problem and argued for Jira as connective tissue rather than a destination.

With a 2026 lens, much of this thinking anticipated what would later become conversations about context graphs and intelligent systems — using technology to infer how work items are related and pull people in as they're needed. That wasn't the framing at the time, but the conceptual territory is there.

As part of this process, I had the opportunity to engage in discussions with teams from Invision and Dropbox, both strategic partners. These meetings were instrumental in understanding and shaping the optimal use of Jira considering the unique perspectives and requirements of external partners.

Without the design thinking spearheaded by Daniel, we would have kept talking circles and people would have had a very hard time grasping what we were working on because of the abstract nature of the project.
— Taylor Pechacek, Group Product Manager

Taylor drove a strategy presentation to Atlassian's founders, which I contributed to — particularly the concept articulations and UX framing. The pitch resonated clearly with leaders in the room. A team received significant funding coming out of that process, and I went on to work with them on the development information panel in Jira — a direct downstream implementation of the "derived" concept.

The strategic direction also influenced Atlassian's devops strategy, shaping how the company connected work items across development, deployment, and operations tooling.

Years later, Atlassian introduced its "System of Work" positioning — a better framing, outside the confines of Jira. The Atlassian suite, not just Jira, became the connective tissue.

The concept was presented at Atlassian's Team conference (formerly Summit).