What Atlassian adds: turning personal manuals into team agreements

A colleague wants to discuss a question immediately. You want to read what needs deciding first. Both of you are trying to work carefully. Yet your silence feels like delay to them, while their unexpected call feels like pressure to you. Knowing each other’s preferences helps. It does not settle how the next decision will happen.

Atlassian’s My User Manual guide asks teammates to prepare, discuss and save their manuals. Prompts include working hours, communication and feedback. People choose what they feel comfortable sharing. This makes the manual part of a conversation rather than just a document to circulate.

Two useful preferences can collide

Your manual says: “I think better when I can read the question beforehand.” Your colleague writes: “Talking together helps me find the central issue.” These are two routes to a good answer.

An agreement can accommodate both. The person raising the issue writes down the question, required decision and deadline. The other gets half an hour to prepare. You then discuss options for ten minutes and record the decision. This is our practical example, not an Atlassian prescription.

The manual explains a need. The team agreement determines how you respond when there is actual work to do.

Include exceptions

“Message me first” works until a customer incident needs immediate action. “Feel free to call” works until everyone is constantly interrupted. Agree on a channel for ordinary questions, an expected response time and a concrete threshold for urgent contact.

That makes urgency something both people can recognize. A preference for quiet need not delay an incident; a preference for conversation need not dictate everyone’s calendar.

Our guide to creating a personal user manual can help you find words for your patterns. Use those words to ask better questions, not to assume how a colleague must be treated.

Sharing remains a choice

Atlassian explicitly includes voluntary disclosure in its ground rules. Our practical addition is to protect that choice afterwards: agree who can read the text and how its author can change or remove a passage.

A manager can share an example without expecting employees to match its intimacy. “Send written feedback before our meeting” is already useful. No private story is required.

The agreement itself must also be open to challenge. If a manager treats every question as urgent, someone needs to be able to say so safely.

Check a real work moment

The guide is a practical exercise, not a measurement of your team’s results. A successful meeting does not prove that decisions become faster.

Choose one recurring moment, such as feedback or a planning change. Try an agreement for two weeks. Then examine one example: did both people know what to do, could each contribute and which exception was missing?

The value appears in the next call, when both people understand why it is needed and who will record the decision.