Why Atlassian dedicates 10% of engineering capacity to developer productivity

For the last two years, collaboration software company Atlassian has been investing in improving developer productivity globally. Meanwhile, India is Atlassian's fastest-growing R&D centre, and developer joy is a huge focus for the company here as well, according to Paranth Thiruvengadam, Head of Engineering and India Site Leader, Atlassian.

The Sydney-headquartered enterprise software company has increased its headcount in India from 60 to 2,700 over the last seven years, with the country comprising its largest employee base after Australia and the US. 

Two-thirds of the employee base in the country is engaged in core R&D, said Thiruvengadam, while speaking in a panel discussion at the 16th edition of TechSparks, YourStory’s annual flagship startup-tech summit. 

The company dedicates 10% of its engineering capacity only to improving developer productivity.

“This is a big investment from top down. So, for example, if you take our IT service management business, we have 550 engineers working on it. About 55 engineers actually work only on improving developer productivity,” Thiruvengadam said in the panel moderated by YourStory founder and CEO Shradha Sharma.

Atlassian took the step following an assessment of developer experience and friction points. 

"A few years back, it [developer satisfaction] was 49%. Today, it is 80%. What does it mean for a developer? For every developer, the average PR (pull requests) count has improved by 66%. The total number of experiments that we run has improved by 10x,” he added.

When the developer efficiency goes up, the output is also significantly different.

The company is looking to expand teams across functions, from sales to support functions, said.

Atlassian is not just hiring engineers but also top leadership, based in India. The company is hiring senior leaders with global responsibilities. "From day one, we realised the best way to grow in India was by hiring senior leadership, and giving them global responsibilities and global charters," he noted.

"And it's not just leadership alone. Every pillar of products and every pillar of platform engineering, we have a very, very significant presence here," Thiruvengadam added.

The company offers tools like Jira (tracking work), Confluence (collaboration), and Trello (organising work).