March 8, 2023
Atlassian has announced that, following a reorganization a month ago, it will be laying off approximately 500 employees. This represents about 5% of its total workforce, making it the latest tech company to announce significant layoffs amid deteriorating economic conditions.
Co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar announced the layoffs in a staff memo saying, “with the heaviest of hearts “To those who are leaving us: we are deeply sorry,” they said in the note, disclosed as a regulatory filing in the US.
“Today marks a very hard day in our 20-year history,” they wrote “We have made the difficult decision to rebalance our team to better position Atlassian for the long term, meaning we will be saying goodbye to around 500 Atlassians, or 5% of our employees.”
They explained that the round of layoffs is not necessary on financial grounds and is not intended to reduce costs. Rather, it is an admission that recent “tough decisions” to prioritize “the most critical work for our current and future customers” were insufficient.
Atlassian will specifically reduce staff in areas such as talent acquisition, program management, and what it refers to as “research and insights.” Atlassian says the idea is to “better position it to execute against its largest growth opportunities.”
According to the co-founders, these opportunities are cloud migrations, IT service management (ITSM) and “serving our enterprise customers in the cloud.” It’s no secret that Atlassian’s focus in recent years has been on its cloud services, and it looks like it’s doubling down on that, as well as products like Jira Service Management, the ITSM solution it launched in 2021.
The sources for this piece include an article in TheRegister.
