[CASE STUDY] How Event Marketing at Atlassian planned Team '25 by rolling out a new operating model

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How would you go about planning a flagship event attended by thousands in person and online? For @Sherilyn Swan, Head of Engagement Marketing Shared Services, @Kelsey Pence, Operations Manager, and @Jack Brickey, IT Project Manager, orchestrating Team '25 meant rethinking and simplifying every aspect of how the Events organization (spanning across 10+ cross-functional teams and 80+ team members) works.

Table of contents

Rolling out a brand new way to work

• Step 1: Define a complete operating model
• Step 2: Audit your existing operating model
• Step 3: Don’t be afraid to test
• Step 4: Build the foundation
• Step 5: Bring in the details
• Step 6: Get the enablement started
• Step 7: Keep the enablement going

Learnings and recommendations

• Slack integration
• Weekly standups
• Smart links

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Rolling out a brand new way to work

Step 1: Define a complete operating model

The most important thing Sherilyn and team wanted to start with before diving into tools and tasks is that above all, they needed a comprehensive operating model to support event management. Jira is the tool that supports and enables your ways of working, but it can’t deliver the entire solution.

With clear answers to these questions, they were able to go into the process knowing how to build the structure:

• How have we defined the event leader/manager role?

• What is the workstream lead (we call them champions) and workstream member role?

• What meetings or reviews are held, including cadence, attendees, documentation, agenda, etc?

• What are our approval flows?

💡 Key takeaway: Remember, you don’t have to know every possible thing about Jira (or any tool) to just start. As long as you have a solid operating model planned, you can use the basics of the tool to support you.

Step 2: Audit your existing operating model

Next, Sherilyn, Kelsey, and Jack took stock of how things were currently being run. While the team had been consistently putting on incredible events, their current set of tools — Confluence, Slack, and email — were designed for communication, not project management tracking and leadership reporting at this scale. Timelines and deliverables were created in a static, distributed way so they quickly became outdated, or at best unreliable. They needed to use the right tools for the right jobs!

After the audit, the team decided this project was going to address these key issues:

• Accountability and visibility: The team should easily be able to pull up clear, up to date roadmaps with assignees and status for every task.

• Single source of truth: Jira shouldn’t be the only tool the team uses, but it should have all the details related to all the tasks for each workstream brought into one place.

Now, Jira would become the home for project management (timelines, tasks, and owners); Confluence would be the centralized tool for knowledge management and visuals; Slack, email, and Loom would be used for effective communication.

Step 3: Don’t be afraid to test

Before committing to a structure for this scale of project, the Program Management leads started by learning. They took Jira 101 courses, got to know how other teams were using Jira, and connected with other event marketers through the Marketing Professionals Community group.

With a solid idea of what Jira can do, they brought in every date and deliverable they knew of into a test project and tested plenty of different ways to organize and collaborate. Taking the time to visualize all the possibilities was key to making sure they chose the approach that made the most sense for the entire cross-functional team — and they could document exactly why.

Since Team '25 is such a large flagship event with so many moving pieces, the first thing to get clear on was all the different workstreams and how they would break down into actionable tasks.

Step 4: Build the foundation

The team started by creating Epics as the highest level items. These mapped either to entire workstreams, or for workstreams with a lot of volume, to larger buckets of work within them. For example, Content was one of the largest so it was divided into:

• Content: Breakout Sessions

• Content: Founder Keynote

• Content: Learning & Certifications

and so on. The easiest rule to follow when it came to determining epics was that each one had to be led by a single workstream champion (who does not necessarily own all of the tasks within that workstream).

Next came the tasks belonging to each epic. These were:

• Task: a piece of work that needs to get done

• Deliverable: a tangible asset that gets shipped (emails, blogs, guides, etc.)

• Major Milestone: a key progress moment that gets reported on to partner teams and leadership

• Meeting/Event: a cross-functional meeting the team needs to prepare for

These were chosen not because they needed different workflows, but because it made the project easier to digest at a glance, especially with its scale. This also allowed the team to filter by task type and see, for example, all the deliverables that needed to go out in the coming month. If you prefer a more straightforward approach, simply begin with just Task.

In terms of statuses, the rule of thumb was to keep things as simple as possible. They started with the classics: To Do, In Progress, and Done.

Then, they added a few others that were just as essential for their use case: In Review, Blocked, and Canceled.

That’s it. Simple!

💡 Key takeaway: To effectively enhance your project with customizations, start with only the essentials. Allow the complexity to develop naturally as your team gradually becomes more familiar with the system and its features over time.

Step 5: Bring in the details

Now that the foundation was set up to support all of the work that goes into the flagship event, it was time to get every piece of information into the Jira project to avoid surprises and gaps after kickoff.

Sherilyn, Kelsey, and Jack met with every workstream owner to get the complete list of to-dos, which could be in the hundreds. This was one of the more time-consuming aspects of the process but it was worth it, because this is when they really learned the ins and outs and got a chance to do some early enablement — showing each lead the basics of how the project would work and the rituals surrounding it.

Once workstream owners were on board, inputting each one of their hundreds of tasks manually wouldn’t make sense, so Sherilyn and team provided a template:

They could then take these lists and use the bulk import function to get over 1000 tasks into Jira, which saved a considerable amount of time and effort.

Step 6: Get the enablement started

With everything imported and visualized in Jira, Sherilyn and Kelsey were ready to show the team the ropes. But before jumping right into hands-on training, it was critical to introduce everyone to the central operating model so they could see the whole picture.

This presentation made a lasting impression on the team because it was fun, engaging, and creative. Sherilyn and Kelsey used metaphors from orchestras to dream houses to make this new way of working approachable and clear.

The key takeaway about Jira: it was one of several key tools like Confluence, Slack, and Zoom that would help the team make the most impact — each in a clearly defined, differentiated way.

Now for the Jira training. It focused on creating and viewing tasks within the hierarchy, filters, and views. The goal was to provide knowledge and flexibility so that each team member could customize however they prefer, and to highlight its integrations with already well loved tools like Slack. Sherilyn and Kelsey also provided in-depth guides on Confluence and bite-sized training through Loom going over one feature at a time.

💡 Tip: Create commonly useful saved filters ahead of time so that the team can jump right in instead of creating their own.

Step 7: Keep the enablement going

Even if you’ve just delivered the training of a lifetime, it’s just as important to be consistent and available for questions and feedback as the team ramps up because there’s a huge difference between learning from a one-time presentation and navigating the tool yourself.

Sherilyn and Kelsey stood up office hours twice a week and encouraged everyone to join whenever they had questions, no matter how small. They also provided a Slack channel and recorded tips on Loom for team members to get support asynchronously. As the team got ramped up, some “change champions” organically stepped up too to lead by example and help everyone get more comfortable.

Learnings and recommendations

Slack integration

The Jira + Slack integration became a key part of the Events team’s setup because it alerted team members directly about the tasks they owned or were watching. They would get a direct message notification if a status or due date had changed, if their task was overdue, if they were mentioned, and more. Since the team relies more heavily on Slack than on email, this was a game changer. Having Jira come to you made it easier to get into the habit of keeping the project up to date on a daily or weekly level.

Weekly standups

Besides general project check-ins, the team introduced a weekly “Jira Dates & Deliverables” call with very specific guidelines.

• Automatic reminders to check Jira every Friday

• Meet for 25 minutes first thing on Monday

• Look at only 2 filters: Overdue and Due This Week

This way, the whole team can start their week by digging into each item that’s overdue to get to the root cause and remove blockers. Then, they can see what’s upcoming in the week ahead and make sure everyone feels confident in their immediate tasks and due dates.

Smart links

To prevent information from slipping through the cracks, the team took full advantage of detailed task views to provide context and cross-link as much as possible.

• Task descriptions: What is this task? Who are the key players? What are the key things team members need to know? What Confluence pages should they read to learn even more?

• Linked work: What tasks are related to this one, whether it’s more of an FYI or a dependent relationship?

• Attachments: What are the key resources that are relevant to this task?

• Comments: Async questions and updates between team members should happen on the task itself instead of in multiple other channels

While the team is still adjusting to these new habits in Jira, they’re finding the benefit of having everything in one source of truth really makes a difference. For example, when they’re ready to kick off planning for Team ‘26, everything will be right there for them — no need to chase down any information through pings and meetings. They’ve set themselves up for success for all future events.

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Got questions for Sherilyn, Kelsey, and Jack? Have recommendations from your own experience running events on Atlassian? Get the conversation started below! 👇

[Fun Man Andy]

Oooh.... I have so much to say... 🫠

[carolyn french]

Very useful to see the process you've taken here, including the screenshots and gifs. Kudos for the thoughtfulness :)