Are RFCs already dead on arrival?

@ibuchanan several vendors are sharing that the Atlassian Marketplace team is moving ahead with their changes to the Atlassian Marketplace reporting section (outlined in RFC-3: Enhanced reports visualisation), even though Atlassian (by means of the author @MalathiVangalapati) did not post a summary of the RFC nor did Atlassian respond to the provided feedback.

Is the RFC format already dead?

Or can we safely conclude that the Atlassian Marketplace team had no intention to listen to the community and just posted the RFC for good measure?

I mean, we already knew this was going to happen right. The work was already nearly done. There was never any intention by Atlassian to actually do anything different regardless of the comments in the RFC.

Which is fine. It’s your prerogative to just go ahead and do whatever you want.

But stop bullshitting us. Stop pretending you live up to your company values. Just own up to the fact that this is how you roll. Stop waisting our time.

@remie,

It’s a bumpy start for sure. Building awareness in Atlassian is hard enough but @Anthony and I are finding there’s much more education needed: about external developers like you, about expectations for transparency and stability, and about how to communicate and engage. We were aiming for a self-service model and have fallen short. That said, I think that education has already been valuable. Even if you don’t see the immediate outcome, we are building a better understanding of the developer community with RFC being our “call to action”.

I’m going to let @MalathiVangalapati post her resolution to RFC-3 to answer your question more directly. One of the “bumps” has certainly been predicting the effort required to perform each of the stages. On that, @Anthony and I still have work to do. We really need to get the “cycle time” for RFCs down so we remove any excuses for PMs to avoid them. In this case, we underestimated the amount of planning & meetings that would be required by company-wide events.

Meanwhile, I’ll be resolving the RFC-1 today with additional thoughts on the practice overall. I don’t share your conclusion that it’s bullshit or a waste of time. Despite the bumps, we’re starting to attract more interest in RFCs. In the last couple days alone, I found 2 “projects” that would have missed any discussion with the community and were likely to have gone straight to announcement upon completion. I think that is improvement, even if the RFC feels like an afterthought (“The work was already nearly done.”)

@remie Do you really see it so absolute as “all pretend” and “waste of time”? Or could it still be a step in the right direction, even if with flaws? From the Lean Startup community, I learned, “If you waited to release until you had no regrets, then you waited too long.” I think that sentiment applies here to RFCs as a practice, and to the subjects of the RFCs. Our goal isn’t perfection: we just need to get better. Are you really convinced RFCs aren’t better?

On this topic, I am really listening. You as a community have “the mic”. Collectively, if you don’t want RFCs, I will close the program.

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@ibuchanan let me start by being perfectly clear that this is not personally directed to you or @Anthony. I firmly believe in your intentions and I think you are doing a great job with the very limited resources (and authority) you were given. I fully understand why you chose a self-service model, and I also fully understand why you have fallen short. Change management is HARD.

So to get straight to the point: Atlassian is a billion dollar company. If it really meant to make this change, it would have invested in doing so. Your manager would have helped you doing so. Their manager would have helped you doing so.

The reason why I call this a waste of time is because Atlassian as a company has set you up to a task that essentially is built around abusing the Atlassian Marketplace Partner community for achieving a very much required internal culture change.

This is the real issue, now isn’t it. That’s all fun and games if it is just internal office politics, but it becomes a problem when Atlassian is putting the burden of her own failure to organise change upon her external stakeholders.

I expect better from Atlassian.

I also do not subscribe to the “If you waited to release until you had no regrets, then you waited too long.” when it comes to dealing with “external” stakeholders. You, Atlassian, are asking something from US. You, Atlassian, have all the power. You, Atlassian, have a market cap of ~40B. You, Atlassian, should be aware of what you are asking from relatively small business owners.

I would love to move this away from the intrapersonal level of the intentions & hard work of @ibuchanan , @Anthony and even the individual authors of RFCs like @MalathiVangalapati.

So @ibuchanan, if you can point me into the right directions of the people in the org chart to which I should be screaming instead, I would highly appreciate it. Because I do not feel either of you deserve it, but I do think Atlassian as a company has every right to be yelled at.

Who do I call if I want to speak to Atlassian?

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