Atlassian launches Stride, aims to curb 'over-collaboration,' noise in team communication
Stride product demo
Atlassian launched a new workplace communication tool called Stride that was built from scratch with knowhow from the company's various products such as Jira, Trell, and HipChat.
The collaboration software is interesting because it's an enterprise social network that's aimed at giving you time to actually focus and get work done.
Go figure. As we've all seen from multiple trends -- enterprise social networks, various chat, and notification tools and open floor plans -- it's easier to collaborate but much harder to focus and get something done.
Atlassian's Stride aims to curb never-ending chat discussions, comment threads, and that feeling that you're chasing your tail. Will it work? Perhaps. A demo of Stride looks promising due to the integration of various elements.
Joff Redfern, product lead at Atlassian, said Stride isn't a suite, but a reimagining of team communication based on the company's experiences. "Stride is team communication to move work forward," said Redfern. "We had to step back and rebuild. We couldn't just bolt it together so we started with a clean slate."
For Atlassian, Stride is a bet that team collaboration, which is a fragmented market, is going to enter a new phase as remote work, freelance economies, and employees across multiple geographies become the norm. Redfern said enterprises are going to see the value in a singular price point and simplicity of one collaboration tool. Atlassian has been using Stride to manage its teams for the last few months.
Among the key features of Stride:
- Stride integrates voice and video conferencing seamlessly.
- Turns conversation into work assignments -- actions or decisions -- with integrated collaboration.
- Stride also has Meetings, a tool that turns a discussion thread to a conference call easily.
- The software includes a "focus" mode to let people know you need space to get work done. When you return from focus mode you'll get a recap of notifications and items missed.
Here's a look at focus mode:
The most interesting point is that Atlassian built Stride to "overcome over-collaboration." Users can customize how they want to stay in touch with their teams yet also allows for rich text, emojis, image annotation, and other items.
Part of the efficiency of Stride will be the native integration of various features that are typically spread across various enterprise applications. The focus feature may also change the culture so it's ok to duck out from the enterprise collaboration rat race, noted Redfern.
Oji Udezue, head of product at Atlassian, said the design aim of Stride was to be clean and enable control over noise. Users can customize notifications and filter notifications easily. Video was integrated throughout. "We spend too much time chatting when we should be talking so we made it easy to switch to video for a team meeting and quick conversation," said Udezue.
Atlassian will roll Stride out to current HipChat Cloud customers and take early access requests. Here's a look at the pricing.
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