Unleashing Team Potential from Within: How Atlassian Builds Jira by Living in Jira

Atlassian's mission is to "help unleash the potential of every team." This ambitious goal is pursued not just by creating powerful collaboration and project management software like Jira and Confluence, but by deeply embedding these tools into the very fabric of their own global operations. The practice of "eating your own dogfood"—or as it might be termed, "Atlassian on Atlassian"—is a cornerstone of their product development philosophy. By having their own diverse teams rely on Jira for everything from software development and IT support to marketing campaigns and HR processes, Atlassian gains unparalleled insights that continuously shape and refine the tools used by millions worldwide.

Jira as the Central Nervous System for Atlassian

From its origins as a bug tracker, Jira has evolved into a versatile platform catering to various team needs, with specialized versions like Jira Software for agile development, Jira Service Management for IT and customer service teams, and Jira Work Management for business teams. Atlassian itself is a living testament to this versatility, utilizing the entire Jira family, alongside integrated tools like Confluence for knowledge management and Bitbucket for code hosting, across virtually every aspect of its operations.

Building Jira with Jira: Atlassian's own software development teams are quintessential Jira Software users. They leverage its agile boards (Scrum and Kanban), backlog management, sprint planning, bug tracking, and reporting features to build, iterate on, and maintain Jira itself, as well as other Atlassian products. This intensive internal use by thousands of engineers provides a constant, real-world stress test and a rich source of feedback for improving performance, usability, and developer-centric features.
Powering Internal Service Desks: Atlassian's IT and support teams utilize Jira Service Management for their internal help desks, managing employee requests, resolving incidents, and handling change management processes. This firsthand operational experience directly informs the development of JSM, ensuring it meets the practical needs of service teams in a high-velocity environment.
Orchestrating Business Team Projects: Non-technical teams across Atlassian—including marketing, HR, finance, and legal—use Jira Work Management and other Atlassian tools to plan projects, track tasks, and collaborate. This broad internal adoption ensures that Jira's capabilities evolve to support a wide array of business workflows, not just software development.
Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration: Confluence is deeply integrated with Jira and serves as Atlassian's central knowledge base. Internal teams document product specifications, project plans, meeting notes, and company policies in Confluence, all linked to and tracked within Jira. This seamless interplay is refined through their own daily collaborative practices.

The "Dogfooding" Culture: Feedback from Every Corner

Atlassian's company values, such as "Open company, no bullshit" and "Play, as a team," foster an environment where internal feedback is encouraged and valued. This culture is crucial for effective "dogfooding."

In an Atlassian Community discussion on dogfooding, Atlassian employees openly share insights into their internal practices. One employee noted, "By moving all of our communications within Atlassian products and making it a requirement our teams/team members have become more accountable to each other." Another shared, "It is true that internal Atlassian teams are encouraged to adopt new features and capabilities but is rare that we force them to (unless we are doing a forced migration and then Atlassian teams go earlier to test the migration process itself)."

This highlights a balanced approach where organic adoption is preferred, but strategic internal rollouts also serve as crucial testing phases. The same discussion revealed that successful internal projects during "ShipIt" (Atlassian's hackathon days), aimed at solving internal pain points with their own tools, have sometimes led to those features being incorporated into the official product roadmap. Examples cited include the "dot dialog for quick shortcuts in Jira, Confluence page layouts, find and replace in the editor."

How Internal Use Shapes Jira's Evolution

The direct impact of Atlassian employees using their own tools is evident in many aspects of Jira's development:

User Experience (UX) and Usability: Constant daily interaction by thousands of "Atlassians" with diverse roles and technical abilities helps identify usability friction points and areas for UI refinement. Feedback on aspects like the Jira Software issue view is taken seriously, leading to improvements in efficiency and ease of use.
Workflow Customization and Flexibility: Because Atlassian teams use Jira for a vast array of different processes, the platform has evolved to offer highly customizable workflows, issue types, and fields, allowing it to adapt to myriad use cases—a flexibility born from their own diverse internal needs.
Integration Capabilities: The need for seamless information flow between different internal teams and tools (e.g., Jira with Confluence, Bitbucket, and third-party applications) drives the development of robust integration capabilities.
Agile at Scale: As Atlassian itself has grown into a large, distributed organization, its experiences in managing agile development at scale have undoubtedly influenced features in Jira Software designed to support larger enterprises and complex project portfolios, such as Advanced Roadmaps.
AI-Powered Enhancements: With the introduction of Atlassian Intelligence and AI-driven features like Rovo, it's certain that Atlassian's own teams are among the first to leverage these capabilities for tasks like summarizing issues, generating content in Confluence, and automating workflows. This internal adoption is crucial for refining these AI tools and ensuring they deliver tangible productivity benefits. Atlassian's Team '25 conference previews indicate a strong focus on AI-powered teamwork, a direction likely validated by internal use cases.

The Benefits and a Balanced Perspective

Running "Atlassian on Atlassian" offers clear advantages:

Deep Customer Empathy: Atlassians experience the product as users, fostering a profound understanding of customer needs and pain points.
Improved Product Quality: Internal teams act as a constant, rigorous testing ground, catching bugs and usability issues early.
Faster Innovation Cycles: The tight feedback loop between internal users and development teams can accelerate the iteration and improvement of features.
Authentic Product Advocacy: Employees who use and believe in their own tools become powerful and authentic advocates.

However, as acknowledged in the Atlassian Community discussion on dogfooding, internal users may not always perfectly represent the full spectrum of external customers, particularly those with different technical skills or organizational contexts. Atlassian mitigates this by complementing internal feedback with extensive customer research, community engagement, and dedicated user testing programs. They also recognize that sometimes teams might adapt their processes to fit the tool, and strive to learn from instances where even internal teams might use a competitor's product for specific needs.

Conclusion: Building for Teams, By a Team Living Its Products

Atlassian's commitment to using its own suite of tools, with Jira at its core, is a fundamental aspect of its identity and success. It’s a continuous, company-wide "dogfooding" effort where every employee contributes to the refinement of the products they build by using them to do their own work. This deep, practical immersion ensures that Jira and the broader Atlassian platform are not just designed with teams in mind, but are actively shaped by the daily experiences, challenges, and innovations of one of the most dynamic and collaborative teams in the software industry: their own.