PODCASTS

 / EPISODE 3

On How to Build Teams of Changemakers

GUESTS

Prar Johnson headshot
Prar Johnson

Head Of Design (Experience Platform) at Atlassian

Episode notes

How confident are you in making tough decisions and letting the team turn them into action? Have you found your individual fit in what you’re looking for or are you still stuck being uncomfortable in other people’s goals and strategies?

Prar Johnson is the current leader for agile and DevOps design teams at Atlassian developing end-to-end core experiences for all of their products. She has over 19 years of experience and spent some time shaping products in some of the biggest companies in the world like Microsoft and Nokia. She shares why she created her own manifesto as a way to control what she could in her career.

Listen in to learn why it is important to sometimes listen to your team even as the leader especially when making a critical decision. You will also learn the many ways you can keep up with the competitor and what the customer wants.

“It’s really important to make sure that you’re getting on what your competitors are doing.” — Prar Johnson (28:24)

Show notes

  • (0:41) Intro
  • (2:28) Prar explains why she wrote her manifesto by self-reflecting on what she could control and what she couldn’t control
  • (4:17) The importance of getting your individual fit and how it helped Prar find what she was looking for
  • (8:19) How to be confident in the information that you have today- making the tough choices and converting them into action
  • (12:30) She narrates how her team made a critical technological decision at Microsoft and forewent her choice as the leader
  • (17:39) The OKRs at Atlassian and how she’s taking her time to understand them and every aspect of the company as a fairly new addition
  • (21:03) She explains how they check into OKRs at Atlassian and the strategy they’re using to set up new ones
  • (27:10) How to keep on your toes with what your competitor is doing and what your customers want
  • (30:25) How setting the tone of direction helps plus working together as a team and as a methodology to find a strategy
  • (35:23) The many factors that lead to the success of processes

About our guest:

Prar Johnson headshot
Prar Johnson

Head Of Design (Experience Platform)

Prar Johnson is currently leading the Experience Platform Design team for all Atlassian products. She has over 25 years of experience as a seasoned product leader primarily growing happy teams to deliver exceptional value for end-users. She has led and scaled teams as large as 100+ across multiple locations for product, engineering, marketing, and design.

Additional resources