Atlassian's former head of product who helped build the $29 billion company from the ground up explains why he's leaving after 15 years to join a search startup

Sajari

Jens Schumacher, chief product officer of Sajari

• In December, Atlassian's former product head Jens Schumacher joined the Australian search startup Sajari as its new chief product officer.
• Schumacher worked at Atlassian for 15 years, helping it grow from a 12-person startup to a $29 billion public company, and he plans to apply his experience in growth to Sajari.
• Now, Schumacher is interested in tackling search because he recalls how customers complained about the search in Confluence, Atlassian's collaboration software.
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Atlassian's former product head Jens Schumacher watched the company grow from 12 people in 2004 to a 4,000-person public company worth $29 billion. Now after 15 years, he's leaving to tackle the next big challenge: site search.

Earlier this month, Schumacher joined the Australian search startup Sajari as its chief product officer, where he will work with the management team on strategy, hiring talent, and building out its product management team.

"That's quite refreshing for me to try something different again," Schumacher told Business Insider.

Still, since Schumacher watched Atlassian grow from the ground up, he plans to bring his experience from various stages of the company to Sajari. In his 15 years at Atlassian, he has worked on popular Atlassian products like Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket. During that time, he has worked on every single product except Trello, which is based in New York City.

Also, earlier this year, he had twins, which has kept him busy. While he was on paternity leave, he realized that things at work were more of the same in the last couple of years, and Atlassian was also starting to get too big for Schumacher. As the company grew, Schumacher had fewer chances to be hands-on in building products and working with designers.

"One thing about Atlassian is the size of Atlassian," Schumacher said. "It doesn't give a lot of flexibility ... There are hundreds of people relying on you. You have your calendar packed, which makes it really hard."

The 'struggle' of getting search right

Meanwhile, Sajari founder Hamish Ogilvy approached Schumacher. They would meet every couple of months to talk about the Australian search company, which has its roots in academia. While Ogilvy was doing his PhD, he found himself frustrated when trying to search documents.

That's why he decided to start building a company that creates a search product for companies and e-commerce sites to use. Eventually, he moved over to San Francisco to head the company.

"Virtually every time a consumer interacts with the company, it starts with a search instead of browsing through," Andrew Newell, head of commercial development at Sajari, told Business Insider. "The need for this type of technology is growing exponentially."

Schumacher himself also became interested because he recalls the "struggle" at Atlassian in getting search right.

For example, when he worked with Confluence, Atlassian's collaboration software, customers complained to him about the search. He says with the current search algorithm, it may be hard for people to search through older documents.

"Customers tell us Confluence is great, but the search sucks," Schumacher said. "The reason why search sucks is developers have predefined what parts of the document or conference information is important, depending on what use case you use Confluence for."

As for Sajari, it takes into account how people use search, Schumacher says.

"Sajari can then adjust the algorithm based on behavior and documents that are most popular," Schumacher said. "It's documents that somebody in the business wants to push for. You're not relying on the developers of Confluence to make that business for you...Search has become more critical and that's what excites me about the opportunity."

'Like a frog in a hot water bath'

Schumacher plans to apply what he learned about growing Atlassian to Sajari, since the strategy and how teams communicate will differ depending on the size of the company.

"When I started off, it was a similar experience," Schumacher said. "At the time, we were all sitting in one room. The Confluence team was on one side with 5 people, the Jira team was on the other side with 5 people, and there were some people in sales...The stages of growth has been very interesting, like a frog in a hot water bath. You don't realize all of a sudden it's 100 degrees."

Currently, Sajari is working on building out its site search and e-commerce. Newell says that since there's a rise in direct-to-consumer startups, Sajari will be well-positioned to take advantage of this trend and serve these companies. The biggest challenge for Sajari, Schumacher says, will be focus.

"Search is a broad field," Schumacher said. "You can think about a real estate website, e-commerce, site search ... I think that's something really important to make sure we do the right thing and have one message to the market."

Right now, Schumacher is working with the leadership team on a strategy to kick of 2020.

"The first goal is to identify and set the strategy for the next year and the next three year horizon," Schumacher said. "Then we will get the opportunity by bringing in more practices like customer interviews. We want to make sure we're really close to our customers and build what they need."

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