I have often made comments about the fact that Atlassian messaging with regard to Forge and Connect is misleading. I have even asked wether or not It’s time to start being open to the idea that Forge may have been a mistake. What is your view on the positioning of forge and the fact that it is taking a big toll on the Marketplace Partner community?
I agree our communication regarding Forge has not been consistent and in some cases is downright confusing. As to why it’s been confusing—there are a few reasons for this, including the fact that Forge strategy has changed significantly in response to Atlassian’s continuing emphasis on migrations to Cloud and as we uncover more data regarding customer and partner requirements from a hosted ecosystem platform. Some of these are sensitive topics that relate to security and data privacy concerns from customers which can make it hard to communicate certain specifics, particularly while we’re still conducting research and the cybersecurity and SaaS Ecosystem landscape is shifting around us (you may have noticed that Atlassian are not the only company investing heavily in app trust initiatives and hosted platforms).
I realise this might sound like a set of excuses, and I’m not attempting to excuse the current state of Forge messaging: more just try to share a some context around the fact that this is a hard problem and a tricky space to negotiate. We don’t treat this lightly and are trying hard to improve here. For what it’s worth, I am personally sorry that our communications haven’t been better regarding Forge, and do wish I’d been more careful reviewing or contributing to comms at certain junctures over the last few years. I know this has been frustrating for the Marketplace Partner community who are already invested in Connect. I feel doubly bad as I was also on the Atlassian Connect 1.0 team and played a role in convincing you all to invest in Connect a few years ago, which was a set of similarly tough conversations at the time.
We are workshopping Forge communications across several teams over the next few months so keep an eye out for improvements and more transparency in this area.
We are often told that a lot of decisions within Atlassian are data-driven. That means that changes that might seem like obvious and quick improvements to us partners will not get the attention they deserve. For instance [FRGE-515] - Ecosystem Jira created in Oct’21 which resulted in the decision to implement We’re removing the allow access prompt for Forge apps which is tracked in the Removing the Need for User Consent Trello card, are not getting top priority because apparently the data tells us that the friction it causes with users is not big enough. In my experience, data driven product development can lead to a culture of fear / indecisiveness as people are reluctant to make decisions unless they have enough buy-in. Is this something you have experienced / recognise within Atlassian product management org? And if so, is this actively being addressed / is this something you are (trying to) address(ing)?
Can you share a reference for the “the friction it causes with users is not big enough” because I am happy to go and personally advocate to change the author’s mind if they still hold that perception 
This feature is a personal peeve of mine (and many internal Forge developers) and the number of reports we get from partners relating to it is significant. The reason this hasn’t been implemented yet is largely due to the fact that the solution is unfortunately significantly more complex than it appears. Forge uses Atlassian’s OAuth 2.0 infrastructure for authentication and there are some gnarly dependencies that span several critical services relating to modifying the consent flow. The team best suited to making the requisite changes have been working on some other important initiatives that unfortunately are higher priority in the shorter term, but this should be implemented soon (I’ll follow up and see if I can get a fresh update on the ticket of when “soon” might be).
As to your second question — I haven’t personally observed issues with too much data causing indecisiveness with prioritisation. If anything I’d love to give our product management team and engineers more data to prioritise and design features effectively. One of the difficulties of building a hosted platform is reasoning about Marketplace Partner requirements because Connect is so completely unopinionated about architecture, which is why we are very much in debt to those who are building apps on Forge today, experimenting with migrations and harmonisation, raising issues, and providing feedback 
Can you please shed some light on what the hell is happening with AtlasKit? Because the marketplace partner community is in an existential crisis over which frontend libraries to use
I can’t in the context of this AMA as I don’t have enough context to give you a meaningful update, but this topic is high on my hit list of topics of concern. I agree that AtlasKit, AUI, or something like it is going to continue to be important for app developers regardless of the platform they use in both Cloud and Server. Atlas Kit has previously had a bit of an idiosyncratic ownership model internally at Atlassian which has caused some strife internally from time to time and this may have contributed to the current situation. Let me dig into this with the rest of the Developer Experience team and get back to you.