Atlassian Team Playbook
Run tomorrow · Primary + examples
A practical team-norm setting play that only works if the agreements stay behavioral, specific, and reviewable.
Best opened when
Open it when recurring collaboration issues keep slowing delivery, handoffs, or workshop quality.
What to steal first
Borrow the rule that every agreement must be behavioral and reviewable within a short horizon.
What not to copy
It is not a culture memo.
Closest move
Core operating sequence
Working Agreements gives a team a facilitated way to turn recurring collaboration complaints into explicit, behavioral contracts. The format starts from real friction — not idealized team values — and translates those frictions into agreements someone could observe in practice. The session is only useful if it produces agreements specific enough to inspect.
The transferable core is the behavioral specificity test and the review date. An agreement is behavioral if someone could notice it happening or not happening in the next two weeks. The review date is what converts the output from a workshop artifact into an operating norm. Without a return to the agreements, they decay immediately.
What does not transfer: the Atlassian template format, the exact dimensions or prompts, and the expectation that the agreements will self-enforce. The session creates the contract; the review enforces it. Those are different moments and require different facilitation.
Run it in the room
You leave with
3–5 written behavioral agreements with a review date and a named owner for the review process.
First failure point: The agreements describe values rather than observable behaviors. Nobody can tell whether they are being followed, so they stop influencing anything within weeks.
What good looks like
How it worked there
Atlassian designed Working Agreements for cross-functional product teams with recurring collaboration friction — missed handoffs, meetings that duplicated other conversations, and norms that had never been explicitly stated. The play worked because Atlassian's operating culture expected team leads to revisit and enforce the output.
The play requires a room that is safe enough to surface the real friction. If the actual problem is that a senior person's behavior is creating the difficulty and that person is in the room with authority to veto the conversation, the agreements produced will paper over the issue rather than name it. The candor the play depends on is not built by the play itself — it has to already exist or be established by a facilitator who can hold the room.
What not to copy · Failure modes
The agreements sound admirable and cannot be observed. Teams write 'we will communicate openly' and 'we will respect each other's time' — phrases that feel meaningful in the session and are invisible in practice. An agreement that nobody can check is not an agreement; it is a value statement. The play only works when every item is specific enough that someone could notice it being kept or broken.
No revisit date is set, so the agreements become wall copy. The session produces a list. The list is photographed, sometimes posted, and never returned to. The agreements that were hardest to write — the ones about specific behaviors the team has been avoiding — are the first to go unenforceable. The review date is not a formality; it is the mechanism.
The play is used when the problem is structural, not behavioral. Working agreements cannot fix unclear decision rights, misaligned incentives, or delivery dependencies that are outside the team's control. Teams sometimes run it as a substitute for harder conversations about sponsorship, resourcing, or cross-team governance. The output looks collaborative but does not address what is actually causing the friction.
Weak signals to watch for
Closest Waypoint move
Primary route
Use the situation route when working friction comes from deeper directional disagreement rather than norms alone.
Use this when you need explicit behavioral norms and can accept that the agreements will require active facilitation to survive contact with real friction.
technique
Use it when the working issue is really about hidden influence and unclear expectations across groups.
Sources and confidence
Primary + examples
Atlassian Team Playbook
Atlassian
Discovery Waypoint
Reviewed by Discovery Waypoint Editorial Team · 2026-04-04
Atlassian