Atlassian Thought of It, #stratapp’s Done It – Social with Structure

Without structure, social collaboration can quickly become a fire-hose of noise and distraction.

Stride’s Big Idea

To help solve this, Atlassian thought of a clever idea to add structure to social. When you posted something in Stride by Atlassian, you could tag the post as a:

• Comment
• Action
• Decision

Think about that for a moment. Not only are you making life easier for your recipients, it enables you to go back to filter on your own posts. For example, “what was that decision I made for Tom last week?” Stride also added new innovations on profile status. Stride encouraged users to take “zone time” to think, research, be creative and get high-value work done. How’s that, a social app making it easier for you to avoid getting caught in the productivity killer trap of always being livechat accessible to your boss and colleagues? Admirable!

#slack Buries Stride

Stride was released in Sep 2017. After only 9 months, Stride was acquired by #slack in Jul 2018. Not long after that, #slack filed for their IPO on the US stock exchange in Apr 2019. There was a ground swell of excitement globally on Atlassian’s innovation to add structure to social. That was probably not great timing for #slack, leading up to their IPO. After acquiring Stride, #slack buried it. Goneski! [apologies for the Australian / New Zealand slang]

#stratapp Goes Next Level

We ran workshops on this social-with-structure idea with business owners, CEOs, executives, mid-level managers, team leaders and frontline employees. We concluded 3 things:

1. 10 tags will cover 90% of scenarios
2. We should add the ability to post or request
3. The same structure could apply to all card types and workboards, not only social messaging and groups

Social Post

Here are the 10 tags inside a #stratapp social post:

Social Request

Here are the 3 tags inside a #stratapp social request:

Filters

#stratapp has powerful filters for all users across the whole app, not only on social messaging and groups. For example, imagine being able to find out the following 3 things in less than 5 seconds: Example #1 I’ve been away for 72 hours. What strategy related questions have been asked, and what decisions or approvals have been made, whilst I was away? Great, now let’s narrow that down further to only the strategy aspects I own or am directly involved in. Example #2 For the risks, ideas and challenges I currently own, what is the status of tasks I have assigned to others? Example #3 Who is having the most influence on strategy or KPI-related work? Who are the emerging team players on KPIs? Who are the emerging innovators on strategy?

Zone Time

Let’s not forget that other Atlassian innovation in Stride regards the user’s profile status (described as “zone time” in the opening paragraphs above). #stratapp has expanded further on that innovation:

Whiteboard Video

Here’s me on a whiteboard explaining how and why we applied structure to social. Startup tech founders don’t tend to do this, but you’ll see in that video, just like in this article, I give full credit to the original thinking and innovation from the talented folks at Atlassian.

Thank You

Thank you for reading (and hopefully sharing). You might also like to read why #stratapp is the best strategy execution software app in the world right now. We hope you become a passionate advocate of #stratapp, the strategy execution app even millennials love.