Atlassian Team Playbook
A free library of short, structured exercises ("plays") for teams: working agreements, a personal user manual, retrospectives, weekly team updates, decision making and more. For a new engineer, a few plays give you ready-made ways to learn how your team works and to explain how you work best.
Guide
Career Growth
Atlassian
30 to 90 minutes per play
All
Free
What it is
The Atlassian Team Playbook is a free collection of "plays": short, research-backed exercises that teams run to solve common problems. Atlassian states that play instructions and content are free to use and share, and you do not need to be an Atlassian customer.
Plays are grouped into themes such as aligning work to goals, planning and tracking work, and sharing knowledge. Examples include OKRs, the DACI decision-making framework, Project Poster, Retrospective, Working Agreements, Weekly Team Updates, My User Manual and page-led meetings.
Why it is useful in a first job
As a junior you will not usually be the one running team exercises, but several plays are directly useful to you:
- My User Manual. A one-page description of how you like to work, communicate and receive feedback. Writing one in your first month helps your manager and teammates, and reading theirs (if they have one) tells you a lot.
- Working Agreements. How a team agrees its norms: response times, meeting habits, review expectations. If your team has one, read it on day one; if not, ask how these things work.
- Retrospective. How a good retro runs, so you can contribute in your first one.
- Weekly Team Updates. A structure for short written updates that you can borrow for your own status notes.
Reading a play also gives you vocabulary for suggesting improvements later without sounding like you are criticising the team.
How to use it
Pick one or two plays that match what is happening around you. Do not arrive in week one proposing that the team runs five new exercises; use the plays privately first (for example, write your own user manual), and suggest one to your team when there is a real problem it would solve.
A note on bias
Atlassian builds Jira and Confluence, and some plays include templates for those tools. The exercises work equally well in a shared document or on a whiteboard.
Free vs paid
Free. There is no paid tier for the playbook itself.
Is it worth it?
Yes, as a reference. It is not a course; it is a set of recipes. The personal user manual and working agreements plays alone are worth the visit in your first month.
Common questions
Do I need my manager's permission to use a play? Not for personal ones like a user manual. For team exercises, suggest it in a retro or a one-on-one.
How long does a play take? Most take 30 to 90 minutes, and the page for each play states its own time and team size.
Ready to start?
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Stuck on something specific?
Writing only gets you so far. If you want an answer to your situation rather than the general case, book a session and we will work through it together. Sessions are free for approved Sefism members, and a few slots open each week.
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