As a researcher interested in teamwork and team effectiveness, March 2020 was a fascinating moment for me. Around the world, knowledge workers at organisations large and small were suddenly forced to work from their homes. As we scrambled to get a read on the effect this was having inside Atlassian, we also commissioned an international, multimodal study to capture and make sense of the impact on individuals and teams across a range of industries as they grappled with these extraordinary changes.

It’s fashionable in the tech world to say that you’re cool with failing. But failure leaves a bad taste in your mouth. The only way to get it out is to prove you’ve learned from your mistake. In that spirit, I recently kicked off a discussion amongst the engineering teams at Atlassian about setting deadlines for the sake of deadlines and, worse, prioritizing that deadline above customer value or the overall health of your product (and team, for that matter).