Dominic Price v2: Curiosity, Impact, Listen, Value | Work 20XX Ep38

Dominic Price v2: Curiosity, Impact, Listen, Value | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick, Ep38
English Transcript 

Cold Open: 
All right.
In three, 
two, one.

Jeff Frick: 
Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here. Coming to you from Anaheim. Not the home studio for a little something different. I came down to the Anaheim Convention Center right across the street from the happiest place on Earth to come see Atlassian and their Team ‘25 event. I think there’s 5,000 people running around the convention center. And we're excited to have our next guest. You know him as Dom Price. He’s been on before, Dom, great to see you. What's your official title? Work

Dominic Price:
Work Futurist

Jeff Frick:
I should know that

Dom Price:
Best made up job ever

Jeff Frick
I should know that. Well, so I was sitting in on your, your session yesterday, and I have lots of great notes. I want to jump in to you it was all about building a great culture right in the workplace. So one of the first ones ‘TTV’ 

Dominic Price:
‘Time to Value’ 

Jeff Frick:
‘Time to Value’ which is also often said ‘Time to Money’ or excuse me, ‘Time to Market’ what I wanted to share with you is Craig Barrett when I worked at Intel he said, no, no, no, it's ‘Time To Money.’ So when you think about time to value, time to market, time to money, how do you accelerate that, help people accelerate that? 

Dominic Price:
So the honest answer is, I think the mistake we've made in, in organizations recently is when we said time to market, we did the easy things fast and we left the hard things.

Jeff Frick:
Isn’t that just the human way? 

Dominic Price:
Yeah. And so what's happened is we've got a whole lot of things out to customers and then gone. Yeah, they don't value them they don't want them. But we were fast. Right. And so what's happening in a lot of businesses right now is is this, this curiosity. What do our customers actually want? What do they value? What will they happily hand over money for because they get so much value from it they're happy to spend. So I think time to value is like the time to money moment. It’s like there's no point in me shipping something if no one's going to use it.

Jeff Frick:
Right. 

Dominic Price:
So the difference of the time to value is I have to intrinsically understand the wants, the desires, the needs, the problems of the person I'm delivering to, which is different to. Here's a backlog, I’ve shipped something and I'm done. 

Jeff Frick:
Right, right and I’m the product manager. And I'm so proud of my new baby that I gave birth. 

Dominic Price:
Yeah I've shipped a thing. Right. And so time to value requires more curiosity. It also requires you to work differently across the organization. So instead of getting to Friday and celebrating shipping, you have to then wait two weeks, three months will go how's the customer using the thing we gave them and do they value it? It's a different question and often a quite confronting answer. 

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, I think that's one of the un unreported benefits of a subscription model because if you just buy in a perpetual license, you know, maybe every year, you gotta justify the extra 15%

Dominic Price:
Think about it 

Jeff Frick:
But if you're paying every single month,

Dominic Price:
Yep 

Jeff Frick:
You've got that engagement. And it also forces us vendor side. 

Dom Price:
Forcing function 

Jeff Frick:

We’ve got to keep delivering every single month. 

Dominic Price:
It’s a great forcing function. But it's funny how, essentially in the last like 5 or 10 years, a lot of the senior leaders I've worked with, I'm like, you've inadvertently created so much urgency in your business that you're busy doing stupid things. So your urgent, but you have no purpose. 

Jeff Frick:
Right, right. Not, It’s not a recipe for success, no.

Dominic Price:
It’s not ideal 

Jeff Frick:
Alright, I want to go to another one of your topics which is learning velocity.

Dominic Price: 
This is my favorite. 

Jeff Frick:
And a friend of mine, Bill Schmarzo he once said that scale learning is actually more powerful than scale economics. Which is pretty profound because we know how powerful scale economics are. But you talk about scale learning and trying to expand it and accelerate it and spread it out. Share some of your thoughts about, you know, what it's all about. 

Dominic Price:
So essentially just imagine there's two types of organizations in the world. One that's very accepting of changes happening in their environment and around their world. And they see those changes. They take insights from them, and they use those insights to course correct right to stay relevant. The second organization is ignorant to what's happening outside its four walls. And it's like we have a plan and we're doing it regardless. So they have no learning velocity. They're not going to learn because they're not listening. They're not curious. They might ship fast, they might ship good. They might see something that seemed like a good idea, but they've forgotten to listen to the market. They've forgot to listen outside their four walls. So I have a belief, I don't care if I'm right or wrong on this one, but I have a belief that learning velocity, the ability to take in inside, apply it, course correct and redeploy something different, a different product or a different service. That is a positive differentiator for any business right now, because every industry I work with is up against competitive challenges. And if you learn one degree faster than your competition, I think you can win. Yeah. So it's not it's not what we've been talking about for a few years. This execution muscle that everyone was concerned about. It's not delivery. It's open your eyes, open your ears, open your senses. What can you learn and how can you apply it? The irony is, when I talk about this to business leaders and when they get honest which is, sometimes over a glass of wine and sometimes in a quiet room, they're like, oh no, we have all the insights. We do nothing with them. Most businesses I work with,

Jeff Frick: 
That’s even worse, right? 
That's even worse.

Dominic Price:
Most businesses, it’s not a I need more data. It's I need more permission and freedom to use that data to course correct. And they’re nervous to course correct. Because what you have to say is the plan we built Jeff was wrong. Learning velocity means saying the way we thought this was going to happen was wrong. We have to admit our mistake and our and our fragility to forge a new path. If we're never going to admit our mistake, we're never going to learn. 

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. It's interesting. I was just in Lesley Martin's. I was looking up Lesley Martin's session from, Udemy. She had said they even have one day a month that they give everybody the day off to learn, which is pretty amazing. And, you know, most people, you know, it’s like here's a tool, here's a tool, he’s a tool but we don't actually spend the time to help people get the most out of the tool. 

Dominic Price:
So mate, this is where the world gets deeply ironic. So me and you go to a whole of conferences like this and the average conference you go to finds an elite sports person. We have Jenson Button we have James Vowles from [Atlassian] Williams Formula 1 team. They put them on stage and they tell you about elite performance in a sports team. And none of us sit down and go ‘Hang on. The real difference is’ you spend a lot of time training to then, do. 

Jeff Frick:
Right 

Dominic Price:
And in business teams we spend all of our time doing and no time training. So the one lesson I always take when I listen to an elite sports person is I need to invest in my learning, my training, because otherwise I'm just repeating the same version of me and I'm not improving. So that one day a month. It sounds indulgent, but you’re like that makes sense. You've got 12 opportunities a year to improve how you work and course correct? Yeah, that should be the norm, like when can we make that the standard that we all adhere to.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right, And how much of that I mean how many other projects do you have that you invest at least that much time

Dom Price: 
Easily, yes. 

Jeff Frick:
That don’t have near the yield, don’t have near the yield. All right, so another thing that you talked about, is head, heart, and hands and storytelling. And as much as it's about features and cost benefits and trying to deliver satisfaction, how do you package that in such a way that people are going to be more receptive to it? And you guys even have a person who's in charge of story telling. You have the coolest titles of any company I know.

Dom Price:
It’s funny because you're a natural storyteller, and not only are you a natural storyteller, you're great at getting other people to tell their story right, which is itself an art form. In my world at Atlassian we have a whole of people that default to fact, we have a lot of engineers, a lot of high IQ, highly intelligent people that see the world as black and white, right, right or wrong. And so when that comes to change, many people will often say, ‘Hey Jeff, we need to change.’ And you’re like ‘And?’ I'm like, well we just we need to change, you’re like no, no, where's the story? And so the model we've used internally for a while, with all of our teams and even our sales teams and our marketing teams, is, if you imagine a world of head, heart and hands, head is the logic. Right? If we make this change, we get 70% more of something, right? Some people really love the numbers. They love the logic. The second part is the heart, the emotion. When we get that 70% increase, here's how it'll feel. And you're like, ooh, like, now we're getting it. It'll feel better, you'll feel faster. You'll feel like you've got more mojo. You'll feel more effective. You'll feel more valuable. You're like, ahaa, I like the feeling. So if I do the 70, that's the feeling. You’re like, cool. The hands is what's the action? I now need you to do x and y and z to achieve that. What we find when we roll out this training at Atlassian around storytelling, is people have one of those they default to. So I hate to stereotype, but let's do it. I'm not going to get fired. Our engineers default to logic. They want to see the 0’s and 1’s. HR and Marketing default to heart. How does it feel? You’re like... And our program manager’s are like, give me the action. Give me action where’s the task? Right. Well, well you're like, cool I get then you default to one and effective story needs all three. So what we're What we're willing to do is to package a course And the reason we're doing this is every single day, every leader, every worker in Atlassian has to influence someone else to do something on their behalf every single day. And if you do that through storytelling, it's really effective. The alternative is you do it through favors No business can scale through favors.

Jeff Frick:
No, no, that runs out, that runs out of juice pretty quickly

Dominic Price:
runs out Jeff, can you do me a favor and run that report? Can you do me a favor man? Favors don't last. But storytelling drives permanent persistent change. 

Jeff Frick:
Right. So another big theme here is you talked about it in your thing is the user manual. And also kind of the documenting of goals. And I think, you know, one of my favorite lines, right. ‘Assume’ makes an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’. And there's way too much assumption going on. And then also making sure that those goals are aligning to that bigger objective. And then as somebody said, and that's not that's not the work product No that's not the output of what we're trying to get done. So share a little bit about you know, you invest upfront in sharpening the saw You invest in front of defining these things. To get a whole lot more efficient when you're actually in flow. 

Dominic Price:
Yeah yeah. So great. Great question. So again imagine you're a new team forming together. The temptation is We've got some goals let's start the work. Right, the quicker we start the quicker we finish right. And you're like maybe not. So one of things we do is we say, we say to our team well, let's assume you've never worked together, right? Dom, Jeff, Mary and Rajeev are going to work together. The danger is we all assume how each other works. Because you work like me, right? Surely you all work like me. Well you don't. You've all got different backgrounds, different customs and cultures and rituals. So the first thing we do is the ‘My User Manual’ exercise ‘My User Manual’ is if you buy me from an electronic shop, how do you use me? How do you consume me? If you buy a new TV? Go to the user manual. You hire a human, no user manual. So we document it and we tell that story to each other. Here's how I like feedback. Here's how I communicate. Here are my values. Here's how I work well. Here are my working hours. Here are my working conditions. And when you hear that you're like, Ahh you're different than me. How cool. Right I can work with you now. So that's step one. Step two is we build a social contract. It's called a ‘Working Agreement’ of how we're going to work together. When are we going to meet? How do we meet? What does the meeting look like? How do we communicate? Is it Slack? WhatsApp? Confluence? Jira? We build all that those rituals on purpose in advance. Because again I have my way of working. You have your way. If we glue them together by accident, it's really clunky. You think I'm doing it? I think you're doing it. We fall out. So we build that social contract of how we're going to work together as humans. Then we start the work. 

Jeff Frick:
How do new employees kind of take that when, you know, they sit down and you're like, Okay, it's day one. We're so excited for you to join us, now we want you to fill out this. This profile about how do you like the work? They must be going What? I've never, no one’s never asked me that before. 

Dominic Price:
So they find it originally quite confronting, then quite confusing. And then it doesn't take long for the penny to drop, there’s that Ahhhhhh I can now remember all the circumstances where I didn't have this and how it caused thrashing, arguments, rework, fallouts. Not because anyone was malicious, Right Because I just didn't know. Right So a prime example There is someone who I worked with a few years ago, and we just always fell out to the point where we went out of our way to jeopardize each other. We were like, I will take you down. And we've been not working well together for a while. And one day we're in the same leadership team. And we did the My User Manual exercise and this lady went first and she's like feedback. She's like, I hate receiving feedback in the moment because it feels like an attack. I like feedback after the event in written form with an example. I will digest it and whenever I've digested it, I will respond to you And I was like ‘Oh’ So then it’s my turn I’m like I like feedback in the moment. And if you give it me after the event, I feel like it's an attack because I can't respond. The, we were identical people,

Jeff Frick:
180 degrees 

Dominic Price:
but we were the same like every other areas of my user manual same, same. So we were 95% aligned just as humans. But the 5% difference literally made us hate each other. As employees of the same company. And you’re like ‘ha’ so we’re like, hang on, if we can solve that, if we can come to a compromise of how we do feedback, which we did, we then became the most formidable duo. And it’s so bizarre because I’m like I remember saying to this person I'm like, I honestly have been going out of my way to jeopardize your career. And they're like, oh, same. I've been doing that to you I hate you. And I'm like, no, I hate you. And then you're like, you do realize we're more alike than we are different, but the one difference stops us from being effective. Once we found out It wasn't that we changed. We just compromised. We agreed on a mutual way of working once we had that, we're like we're unbeatable. Because the diversity we brought, the challenges we brought to each other, made us better together than we were apart. 

Jeff Frick:
Right, right. It's just so bizarre, that you can just have a 180 degree different attitude about what's the best practices for feedback. And you both can be completely right in the way you like to take it.

Dominic Price:
We’re both right. 

Jeff Frick:
Okay, so another exciting thing I want to congratulate you on your Atlassian ‘Experts Unleashed’ podcast.

Dominic Price:
Yes. Thank you.

Jeff Frick:
Got through the first season. So since we're talking about feedback. I couldn't help but think of a segment with Patty McCord who specifically said

Dominic Price:
I love that human 

Jeff Frick:
I love it, she said, you know I think you were talking about somebody you wanted to change. Maybe it was this guy and she's like, Well did you ever tell him that you expect him to change? 

Dominic Price:
When she dropped that line on me, she broke me that day. 

Jeff Frick:
And the other thing that she said was for feedback if you give it positive feedback in the moment, that person will be doing that same behavior later that day. So I want to I got a bunch of names of some of your guests. I want to ask get your reaction but let's just go ahead and start with Patty.

Dominic Price:
I mean, what an incredible human. I've known her. I know you've known her for a long time as well. She's just a gift because There’s it's just a life experience or a stage of life or an age or there's something that's happened to Patty where she can look me in the eye with a smile, deliver a line that completely breaks all of my foundations but in such a kind and caring way, because she wants me to be a better person.   She just does not suffer any B.S. And so in that example, I was drinking wine with her one day and having a good old bitch and complain and whinge about a colleague and she just looked me in the eye and she's like, and how did they respond when you told them that? And I was like, Ahhhhhhh I haven't told them that. She's like, ‘But you expect them to change?’ I was like, ‘Oh God, you've done it again.’ Like you've broken me. And she just makes me a better person, but I always have like It’s like an AI Rovo agent I've got a little Patty voice in the back of my head that every now and then I'm in a situation, I'm like, What would Patty do? 

Jeff Frick:
would Patty do that’s good one. 

Dominic Price:
What would Patty do? cause it normally makes me a better person. It normally enables me to pay it forward. It normally means I has the confronting tough conversation early rather than late, and it's easier rather than harder. And I do it through curiosity and generous assumptions. Not I want to change you or make you a better person. I just want to have a chat. So she's helped me in my career and that episode, I loved it. There was so many gems in there, I’m like we can all try and be a little better at how we operate. 

Jeff Frick:
And she was fired up in that she was fired up. I think, she was fired up. 

Dominic Price:
She's always fired up. 

Jeff Frick:
When I talked to her two years ago, so I think she's always fired up. All right, let's shift gears another one. So Andy Walshe telling this great story about basically putting people outside of their comfort zone. And the specific I think he says he takes them out into the wilderness. And watches their senses basically turn back on because as people we’re so We have to kind of deaden everything, so we can pay attention to what’s going on

Dominic Price:
We’re muted,  we’re, In society we’re muted and pre programmed. And he loves to take people out of that comfort zone, genuinely not their like LinkedIn comfort zone, which is a weird sort of meme, but like genuinely out of their comfort zone. But then show them their natural survival instinct their natural reactions and just gets them to hone it and train it so There's a few examples, he shared There's one he shared on the show but the one he didn’t share on the show which is one of my favorites, he took a whole lot of elite athletes. And one of them was a Red Bull fighter pilot who does all the stunts, and they've been trying to do this specific stunt. And they realized through all these MRI scanners, that the thing holding this pilot back was fear. So they had an assumption. 

Jeff Frick:
A Red Bull pilot had fear in there?

Dominic Price:
Everyone has some level of fear. So they had a hypothesis that you could just manipulate the fear response in a human and then get them to redo the stunt. So what they did is with this particular person, they did the whole lot of research and this person was petrified of snakes and spiders. So they built a giant dark room, pitch black, full of snakes and spiders. They put all this monitoring equipment on this person. They went, ‘You have to navigate this room’ and come out the other end. It's a labyrinth. You have to get through the labyrinth in a certain time but you also have to keep your heart rate and your physiological responses under a certain level. So they race through cause it snakes and spiders. All the levels are too high. Do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again. After like the eighth time this person's just controlled all their responses. They put them straight in the plane and they do this stunt. Now.

Jeff Frick:
That's amazing. You almost like wear it out, right? Just wear out the fear. 

Dominic Price:
But the fear grows back, right? Cause we adapt to our surroundings. So all they did was say in this false environment I can retrain your response and then we can swap the environment when you're back in society thankfully the human body that we regrow, that response to fear otherwise. Right. We'd all be mavericks. Well it's just we're basically the game he plays is his view is the brain is completely moldable, and we can all mold our brain to be subtly different people if we choose to.

Jeff Frick:
If we choose to,

Dominic Price:
If we think we're hardwired, we're rejecting the opportunity to change and improve. 

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, it's amazing I’ve been watching some YouTubes some of these, deep free diver guys that go down on the string. One guy, I think, can’t even remember the number? Right, I think it was like 160m?

Dominic Price:
It's crazy 

Jeff Frick:
On one breath of air and it's like it's 4.5 minutes I mean it’s totally getting control their of their biology.

Dom Price:
It’s unfathomable stuff that they do, but, his argument is People think it's a physiological purely physical and their like the role of the brain is huge in those things. 

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, yeah it's amazing. 

Dominic Price:
It's why we all have a mindset coach the mindset game. If you're a tennis player, your mindset coach isn't helping you swing a racket, but they're helping you mentally be prepared for that game. 

Jeff Frick:
Right, right. All right, got another one for you, Ben Crowe, living in the gap or living in the gain.  What do you say?

Dominic Price:
So I and Ben was episode one. you know I've known him for years. He talked to me about that the week before I got married. And I remember lying in bed with my now wife. And I was like, just had this conversation with Ben, something we need to talk about. She’s like what? And I was like, so instead of me telling her, I'll just showed her the clip. And I'm like, how much of what we do do you think is in the gap or the gain? 

Jeff Frick:
So explain it to our listeners that missed that episode What's the essence of the. 

Dominic Price:
A simplification. There's two ways of living life. If you're living life in the gap, you're permanently looking at what you've not got. And then when you. So, I'm a public speaker and I do an event with 5,000 people, I'm like five thousand’s not enough I wanted ten thousand. You did an event with 10,000 and you’re like it’s not enough, I want to crack America. You crack America. It’s not enough, I wanna, it’s like you always want more because you're living in this gap. And if you're living in the gap, you forget to recognize and reward your success. Right, it's you're literally spiraling down. 

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. Because you’re never achieve

Dominic Price:
Whatever you achieve

Jeff Frick:
You're never achieving.

Dominic Price:
You're never achieving. 

Jeff Frick:
You're never getting there. 

Dominic Price:
I've always confused that with ambition. Right, so I had a different word for it, which is the wrong word, because then when, when Ben was like, if you're living in the gain, you reflect back. You look back over a year over a quarter, over a few years, and you celebrate what you've achieved, how you did it.

Jeff Frick:
What you accomplished

Dominic Price:
How you did it, the things that went wrong, the things that went well. And he's like, and I'm like, but then you're not ambitious. He says no, no, no, you're still ambitious, but you're rewarding and recognizing yourself for what you've done. And you're then backing yourself to achieve the next thing. But you're doing it for you not for some weird extrinsic motivator. So whether I have 5,000 people or 10,000 in an audience he’s like, why does that matter to you? And you're like, it doesn't. He’s like if fifty people hear your message and they change how they work, are you happy? And I'm like, yeah. He’s like yeah.

Jeff Frick:
That's great. 

Dominic Price:
So the gap is this notion that you're chasing the never ending dream. The gain is going, you're still really ambitious, but you're accepting that you aren't defined by your success. You're defined by how you live life, your morals, your values, your happiness, your relationships. Not by how many people like your Facebook post. 

Jeff Frick:
Right. All right, another one for you. I'm just going to drop the name and you tell me first thing comes to mind. Genevieve Bell 

Dominic Price:
Genevieve is someone who inspired me to understand AI from a human societal standpoint and who showed me that there is a blueprint for how we can do this morally right. If we look at the past. She has researched cultures that are 60,000 years old to understand how technology changes positively impacted, and negatively impacted society. I fear that some people think that AI is a brand new thing and they don't realize it's just another technology advancement. Her blueprint for how we can do this, equitably, fairly, inclusively, and with morals is written down in there for us to use if we choose. Oh, we can go make all the same mistakes we made in the past.

Jeff Frick:
Let's hope we don't.

Dominic Price:
Let's hope we don't. 

Jeff Frick:

Yeah, I saw Social Dilemma. Scared the piss out of me. All right, now this is one of yours, although I think you stole it from somebody or somebody gave it to you. Argue like you're right. Listen like you're wrong.

Dominic Price:
Listen like you're wrong.

Jeff Frick:
That's great. How can you do both? 

Dominic Price:
Really easy. I wasn't doing both. I used to argue like I'm right and listen like I’m right In which case you listen to the confirmation, or you listen to the person and you're like, cute, you're wrong. It's just a matter of time til you realize you're wrong because I'm right. I got it from Dan Pink at the same time, he gave me, a challenge which was, less conversion, more conversation.

Jeff Frick:
That's a great one. 

Dominic Price:
And it's the same flavor, right? With argue like you're right, listen like you're wrong, he’s like Dom You're a six foot four middle aged white guy, and you're an alpha male. You're always going to put your point forward with vigor and excitement and huge energy. Do that and then shut the [ ] up. Open your ears, close your mouth, open your ears and invite the room into challenge. And if you listen like you're wrong, your job is to evolve the idea. If you listen like you're right, you're like, this is my project, my baby and I just have to get this out. So you stop listening for feedback and you ship regardless. So I've used it a lot to put my idea forward with passion and go cool, Jeff and Mary and Rodger, like What's your view? How would you do this? Which persona are you thinking about? If you owned solving this, how would you do it differently? And by inviting them in I get the diversity of opinion and the idea benefits. 

Jeff Frick:
Right, and I think you even said in one of the segments that it's actually a win. It’s a win if you suddenly get changed in the new idea that you didn't know before and I think Andy Jassy from AWS says great leaders are not afraid to change their mind based on new data. So don't dig your feet in. Don't dig your heels in quite so deep. 

Dominic Price:
But if I'm honest like younger Dom didn't do that. Yeah, Younger Dom was like, I need to be right. Because I thought being right made me smarter, made me better, made me higher chance of promotion. And then I certain life experiences you’re like, I don't need to be right, but nor can I be right all the time? So I think one of the most powerful phrases I've used with my teams in the last few years is, I don't know when they’re like, here's this challenge we're up against. How would you solve it? I’m like, I don't know, we can go solve it together but I don't know the answer and I'm not going to pretend I do because that's really dangerous. 

Jeff Frick:
So enabling. Oh my goodness. Opens up so much when you're not afraid to just say ‘I don’t know’ 

Dominic Price:
Me and you between us could list off a million leaders that we've worked with that would never use those words. They would guess at the answer because they think as a leader their job is to be right. You’re like, no, no, your job is to facilitate an outcome. Not to be right. 

Jeff Frick:
Get the most out of your people. All right, well let's shift gears a little bit and talk about Atlassian. So you said you've been here for 12 years. Lot of action here on this Rovo. So pretty exciting news. But it's almost kind of like this, this dream that we've always had about like Google searching inside the enterprise to find information. You guys are finally kind of putting it in play, the technology got in place. And you've got the knowledge base underneath, So talk about how, you know you guys have approached the AI both internally, but then also bringing it to market and making it an integral part, not as a substitute for people.  

Dominic Price: 
An amplifier 

Jeff Frick:
But as you're trusted, your co, your co your coworker actually.

Dominic Price:
It's funny what part of the approach that I've really enjoyed, it's been hard, but I've really enjoyed is where like let's not do AI for the sake of AI. Let's find meaningful use cases. So what that meant we had to do is to stop. We had to sit down, go and talk to a whole lot of customers and go what is it you're actually struggling with? And they're like, honestly, we have no context about what we’re doing We really struggle to discover information. And you get all these use cases, all these stories and you're like, that's a great AI use case. If we can do that through AI or magic or a unicorn, it doesn't matter how you do it. What's the problem that has to be solved? And so that, and the way agents and the agentic workforce came about with people saying, we have a whole of jobs where we rely on humans and they're really manual jobs, and it's quite high friction and lots of thrashing, lots of handoffs. Surely there’s a better way you're like, yeah again, let's build an agent to help you do that, right. So what we did was we went use case. Once you go use case, you start looking horizontally across the organization rather than up and down. So instead of optimizing the silo, I don't want to make marketing more efficient or sales or legal. I don't want to make them more efficient. I want to make the organization more efficient, which is horizontal. And so everything with Rovo, with Atlassian Analytics, with all of our AI ventures is to go, how do we make teams and teams of teams working across an organization more effective? Number one, search. Give them context, right. If I've got the right data in front of me every morning, I've got a better chance of doing my job and I'm free to do my job. like, how good is it when all you have to do on the day is your job. No politics, no reporting

Jeff Frick:
Searching, searching, finding

Dominic Price:
No firefighting 

Jeff Frick:
Well, just the finding and like, I know I saw that thing, but I can’t remember, is it a DM? Is it, you know, where could it possibly be, so I think, Annie Dean in her thing said I forget the millions and thousands of hours. Like a third of the time. People are just looking for information. And I thought Andrew Boyagi was pretty interesting. He was talking about the use cases for devs,

Dominic Price:
Huge

Jeff Frick:
saying not necessarily for writing code. They're pretty good for code But if I'm a non-English speaking person that needs to write up a summary. You know, just a lot of this kind of really interesting, kind of creative uses. I got the next great feature for you, which and you're kind of half way there. I see in that last session when you open pop open your computer, it says it’s your AI like. Get started with AI first thing in the morning. The next thing you need to do is what should I be doing. So of the thousands of potential tasks that I could do right now, what's my highest leverage?

Dominic Price:
If you imagine a feature called ‘Next Best Task’ is that what you want? 

Jeff Frick:
Yes yes yes

Dominic Price:
Interesting. Interesting. 

Jeff Frick:
Might be coming in a in a release there, near you 

Dominic Price:
So I the reason I mention it is. 

Jeff Frick:
Cause that's it, right? 

Dominic Price:
I'm allowed to say this is an organization I was working with late last year. Their CTO ran a pilot with a whole of the teams half the dev teams used AI the other half didn’t. He wanted to see a compare and contrast? Original data look really good. The teams using AI, his, the stats he got with they were about 30%, three zero more productive. Whatever that means is no one's got a good way of measuring productivity but he found they felt more productive. All good. So I went back to him, I’m like, what was the actual net benefit? Like, what happens with that productivity? Is it, you got better product to market faster, is it that you got more into like, did you make more money? Like what what what happened like productivity is meaningless to me. What happened? And he said, give me a couple of weeks and I'll come back to you. And he called me up and he's like, I've got a really embarrassing answer He said, in the teams, there were 30% more efficient because of AI. We had a 50% increase in meetings because people didn't know the next best task to do. So they gave them the time saving. They didn't know what to do with the saved time. They filled it with the lowest value task.

Jeff Frick:
Because that's what we want to do right

Dominic Price:
Human nature 

Jeff Frick:
I mean, it's really easy, Just like it just be dumb and delete shitty emails that I don't need to pay attention to. I feel like I'm busy, but it's not necessary. It's certainly not productive. 

Dominic Price:
So now when I'm working with senior execs and they say we want to roll out AI and I’m like, right. I'm going to gift you an AI right now that doesn't exist. That saves all your team members five hours a week, ten hours a week, whatever. What are you going to do? And they’re like, what do you mean I'm like, do you know, like when I give you that savings do you know what you as a leader, what you’re gonna want to do with it. And they’re like no I'm like right. We need to think about that now cause that time’s going to come. And let's not just fill our time with stuff. Let's genuinely fit in and fill it with more meaningful work. And can than mean wellness, mental health, it could mean we shorten the working week. It could mean we do more complex tasks. We have more engagement in work, and we deliver more value, like or maybe it's a combination of all of them, but if we don't know, we will fill it with crap. 

Jeff Frick:
Fill it with crap. Right? Even get up and take a walk, right? It might be the right answer. You've been sitting down for three hours. You might need a refresh. So get back to kind of Atlassian. Big changes. right, used to be two CEOs. Now there's only one. Spending a ton of money here on Formula One. There's a lot of tech companies that have little logos on formula one cars 

Dominic Price:
We got a big logo 

Jeff Frick:
There’s not a lot that have the big logo on the top, and straight across the chest. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the change in the company as it's continue to grow up and continue to evolve. And, you know, it’s not a little startup with two guys working out of Sydney anymore. 

Dominic Price:
It's fascinating in my 12 years, the one constant, complete cliche, but it's just constant change and evolution. And so we, we one of the things I think we do well is it sounds a bit weird is subtraction. I think we're quite good at stopping things that used to work. That won't work in the new version of Atlassian. We delete them and then we add in new experiments, new explorations, try new ways of working, and F1's a prime example. If you tried that a few years ago at Atlassian I don't think it would have worked. And now we're like, actually, this is going to work. It's enabling us to have some amazing enterprise C-suite level conversations. The thing I'm most excited about isn't, I mean, I can't count on how many versions of the Atlassian name’s on the car. The thing that actually makes me excited is the team of 40 people that we've parachuted into Grove in Oxfordshire, into Williams, to build how they work, like we are changing how the 1,100 people in Williams work every day. 

Jeff Frick:
Wow. 

Dominic Price:
So we are their technology partner and we believe that that will advance how how they work, how they work, will advance the cars and the cars will advance the driver and it pushes them up the grid. We believe that. And we’ll see

Jeff Frick:
And there's nothing that measures it like Formula 1

Dominic Price:
We will see

Jeff Frick:
in terms of marginal improvements

Dominic Price:
Ya, we will see

Jeff Frick:
on the, you know, on the edge. 

Dominic Price:
And so it's it's a real I mean, originally it felt like a geek out, but then you're like, hang on, is there a better testbed? If we believe that our products and our ways of working can amplify high performance in a team. F1. You know what

Jeff Frick:
Start shaving seconds, right 

Dominic Price:
Let's put our name on it and own it. Let's, let's all in and own it. And we're working so closely with our team. we’re even seeing, I spent the weekend down in Melbourne at the F1, my first F1 of the season with the Williams team, seeing how they're now collaborating compared to how they were before they were using our tools and our processes they're like, hey, this is night and day. I'm like, you can feel it. I haven't got a thermometer to measure it, but you can feel it in how they collaborate, how fast they make decisions, how fast they prototype, how they access data and goals, like how they communicate status and updates and engage and connect all that's happening. It's going to result in the car getting further up the grid, not tomorrow, but eventually. And so seeing that live as a comparison is absolutely beautiful. 

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. Wild. So I got to ask you the real estate cycles you get involved in real estate a little bit. You guys are building, I believe like the largest wooden, you can correct me

Dominic Price:
the largest timber structure in the southern hemisphere 

Jeff Frick:
Timber structure. How's that going? 

Dominic Price:
It's going really well.

Jeff Frick:
And when is it, when is this supposed to open? 

Dominic Price:
Yeah, at some point. I think it's like 20..

Jeff Frick:
So you get little bits about it here and there 

Dominic Price:
2026, 2027, I drove past it the other week and I'm like, 

Jeff Frick:
How tall is it going to be? 

Dominic Price:
It’s shooting up It's a substantial building. It's going to be the well one of the biggest buildings in the area. It's a regeneration of an area of Sydney that’s kind of been neglected for a few years. We’re there, there’s a few other tech companies going there, we’re trying to create like our, maybe, 2025 version of Silicon Valley. How do we get a tech hub where we get bright minds together from different organizations, where we get that spark and the friction? How can we create space for innovation for startups and scale ups? How can we use our knowledge and IP and pay it forward to others? And how do we create a hub that creates a second order effect of restaurants and cafes and other businesses? So we're building that and we're building it in the most sustainable way we can. We are breaking boundaries and rules along the way to make it somewhere where we're like, this is groundbreaking. Like let's not just create someone else's building, let's create our vision of it so even throughout the design process, our sustainability team embedded themselves in the design process and said here is our guardrails of what sustainable looks like. We're not builders, we're not architects. But if we want a better future and a better, a better world, we have to care about the climate so let's do this responsibly. And the builders are like ‘You can’t do that’, and like Let's try it. 

Jeff Frick:
Let's try. So biggest surprise, biggest takeaway in the last couple days or something that, you know, kind of you didn't expect,

Dominic Price: 
A subtlety different approach is I think I've been warmed by most people that I've had a conversation with haven't been challenging the content. They've been asking about application. They're like, you know what? What you just said made sense help me do that in my organization. And I love that switch. I feel like as a business society we're done whinging. I felt no, there's been no complaints. There's been no division here this week. There's been a lot of I see the world differently. It's not right or wrong, but how can we help each other progress the thing we're trying to progress. I feel like the world needs a little bit of that right now.

Jeff Frick:
Yes.

Dominic Price:
And so it's been really warming for me that whatever the industry or the background or the role or, I don't know, people have just come together and gone you know, we can help each other. Not in a weird let's sing Kumbaya together type of way. In a genuine like, I can help you, you can help me, so after my session yesterday, a lady came from the company came and asked for how, we spent about 20 minutes together on a whiteboard like, here’s some things you can try in your organization. And then at the end of it I was like, oh by the way, like in 30, 60, 90 days let me know how you going.  She’s like, well, I was like, I'd love to know.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, that's great.

Dominic Price:
I genuinely want to know how you get on. It might not work, but I’d like either way. I want to know.

Jeff Frick:
That's super. Well Dom, it's really a treat to, to finally get to meet in person, not separated by the Pacific Ocean and the international time line. So congratulations to you and the team for, for quite an event. 

Dominic Price:
Mate, thanks for coming along and joining the madness.

Jeff Frick:
My pleasure. And make sure you guys catch him on ‘Experts Unleashed’ It's a really cool podcast. He's Dom, I'm Jeff, you're watching Work 20XX. Thanks for watching. We'll catch you next time. Thanks for listening on the podcast. Take care.

Cold Close:
Boom.
We're out.
You're a master at this
It better be red.
Still better be red.

Dominic Price v2: Curiosity, Impact, Listen, Value | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick, Ep38

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