How much attention are you putting on direct competitors and how does the compete programs look like at Atlassian?

We are always looking at the competition and assessing their moves. Having said that, we don't obsess about it. This means there's gotta be a balance between what the market is doing vs what your own plans should be. Too much outside focus and you are just copying and following someone else, but only internal focus means you lose touch with reality.

Each market is different, so the amount of time you spend on competitive analysis will vary a lot. I've been at startups where the market was very new and dynamic so we had to do monthly competitive analysis and deep feature comparison constantly because all vendors were super fast in releasing new functionality. At another company I worked at, they came to a mature market as the disruptors of incumbent solutions, and so quarterly or semi-annual competitor analysis was a good pace because the large, incumbent vendors, were not moving very quickly.

My recommendation is the following:

• Figure out who your top 3 to 5 competitors are;

• Identify their release cycles (you can see this via press releases, etc.);

• Establish an initial cadence for competitive analysis, let's say quarterly;

• Adjust as needed.