Communication is HARD. Getting started from a blank page. Knowing what to include for your audience. Striking that balance between simplicity and providing enough context. In Atlas, one of our aspirations is to help everyone become a better communicator, so work can move forward smoother.

If you’re curious to learn more about effective tips for communicating with better updates, check out this blog: https://intercom.help/atlas-by-atlassian/en/articles/7241875-simplify-team-to-team-communication-with-these-8-tips

One of our best vehicles for building stronger communicators when it comes to talking about work and outcomes, is the unique Atlas update composer. We envision a powerful experience where our project and goal owners can easily curate their weekly and monthly updates, through quick start actions, context from work surrounding them and AI.

Today, as we work towards that vision, here are some of the components of the update composer experience that make it so special.

Whenever a key change happens in your project or goal, whether that be a status change or target date slips, Atlas encourages you to add some commentary to provide context to your stakeholders on why that occurred and normalise these kinds of updates.

You can even choose a target date that represents a day, month or quarter depending on your level of confidence in the target date, to help communicate timeframes without the anxiety of committing to a hard launch date from day 1.

Our controversial character limit is intended to help you be a better communicator, by considering what to intentionally communicate in your updates that is most important to your stakeholders. The benefits when this is done right? Less time spent on writing updates for you, and less time reading updates to get to the point for followers!

Our Atlassian editor enables you to write rich updates with formatting, media and links to boost your communication to the next level. Format text for emphasis. Add emojis for some colour. Include media to help visualise your update. Link out to pages or designs for more context. Embed views to illustrate things.

Sometimes, more work happens in your week or month than can possibly fit in 280 characters. Fear not! We suggest using the 280 characters as a summary of the MOST important things to highlight to your stakeholders, but we also provide the ability to add a more detailed note so you can elaborate on the extra details, for those who are curious to dig in deeper.

Add a detailed note via the + button and click Note. This note is non-character constrained and when published, will display in a collapsed view so your more curious readers can click to expand it for additional information. You can only add one detailed note per update.

If you find it hard to get started on your update, you can now paste your previous update to give you a platform to start from and refresh your memory on if there are any loose ends to close from last week.

Paste your previous update by entering the /last command and selecting Last update.

Want some more inspiration on what to share in your update? We’ve got a couple of default templates that can help you get started. Simply click on the Templates dropdown on the top right of the update composer, or type /templates.

And we have goal specific templates as well for your goal reporting needs!

The weekly and monthly checkpoints are a great time to reflect on your progress and call out any risks, learnings or decisions faced in your project or goal.

For any existing risks, learnings or decisions that have been created within the week (or month for goals) from their respective tabs, you will see them display on your latest update. You can also create new risks, learnings or decisions straight from your update, using the /learning, /risk or /decision commands or click the + button and select Learning, Risk or Decision in the dropdown.

Lastly, we know that inspiration might strike at any time to write your update, so we’re enabling you to do just that. You can choose to write your update straight from Jira once you’re Atlas project has been connected to a Jira issue, or post from Slack via the Atlas for Slack app.

Post an update from Jira

Post an update from Slack using the /atlas update command

We are continuing to evolve this update composer experience so that we can help teams become more effective communicators. If you have any feedback or suggestions on this experience, we encourage you to share with us via the Give Feedback button in the navigation menu in Atlas.

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