We cloned Atlassian’s new product, Focus, in a few days

What is Dotwork? Dotwork is a platform that provides the building blocks for custom, integrated solutions to support strategy development, planning, execution, and adaptation.

As I'm writing this, it's Friday October 11th. On Tuesday, October 8th, Atlassian announced Focus, a new product set to release in 2025 aimed to help organizations with strategy planning and execution via the adoption of ‘Focus Areas’. Though the messaging and positioning is broadly similar to Dotwork, the difference between these two solutions is under the hood.

The best way to explain it, is to clone it.

And not by wrangling a team of engineers - our engineers have all the hard work baked into the platform. Business users are able to configure and build experiences like this on the Dotwork platform.

How? We've built this stuff before. The Dotwork team is the same team that built Jira Align - a product we were working on for 5+ years before the acquisition in 2019.

Today, a product like Focus might take 4-8 quarters to research, design, and develop internally before it gets to you. By the time you see the announcement, you’ll likely wait another couple of months before you can get your hands on it.

We think that’s a long time to build solutions.

To illustrate how quickly we can design and develop ‘just-in-time’ custom solutions on the new Dotwork Platform with AI, we built a clone of Focus.

Let’s see what a solution like Focus looks like in Dotwork based on what we’ve seen so far in the announcement this week:

Setting up Focus Areas

The first thing we need to do in Dotwork is add a new object for ‘Focus Areas’. We do this in the Dotwork ‘Ontology’ layer where we define objects and their properties.

For Focus Areas, all we need are fields for:

• Status: Dotwork supports this out-of-the-box on every object, we just need to configure the specific status workflow for this new object type
• Owner: We set this up as a basic user-select
• Followers: This is a user multi-select that can populate via a button trigger
• Type: This is a basic value select, but we’re not entirely sure what the purpose of this field is yet

I’ve also set up custom tabs on these ‘Focus Areas’ for ‘Work’, ‘Goals’, ‘Updates’, and ‘Funds’, but before we start building out the visualizations to drop into these tabs, here are a few things we get for free out-of-the-box with this new Object type:

Basic Views:

Now we can check out the Focus areas we just created and see that we have other objects we can create too like Goals, Projects, Metrics, etc… These are all user defined, so I can pick and choose these out of a shopping cart or create my own.

Trend Anything:

A nifty thing in Dotwork is that everything is trending once it lives in Dotwork (or is integrated to Dotwork). This is particularly interesting if we want to pull in something like KPIs for our Focus Areas (or just the amount of work associated with focus areas over time, growth during planning, burndown during execution, etc...).

Custom Relationships:

Now that we have our Focus Areas, we want to connect things back to these Focus Areas in order to anchor relationships for reporting and insights. The great thing about Dotwork is those relationships could be anything and connect to anything.

• You could connect a Metric in Dotwork to a Focus Area can say it’s ‘Measured by’ that Focus Area
• You could connect a Jira Epic or Productboard Feature just by pasting a link (or very soon, by a simple search and click).
• You could connect a doc, a spreadsheet, your grocery list (as long as it has a link!) and give it an explicit, meaningful relationship - ‘blocked by’, ‘dependent on’, ‘impacts’, ‘need to keep an eye on’, ‘foo’, whatever!

Document Editor:

We love docs and we don’t believe the document experience needs to be mutually exclusive from objects - so we decided everything has a full-featured document editor.

Now let’s get into the specifics. We have our ingredients, now lets look at the recipe and bake the cake.

And keep in mind - if we could mimic an experience like this in a few days with one person, imagine what else we can do. If you’re interested in building experiences to support your own unique practices, let’s talk! We've set up our design partnership to do just that ✨

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Visualizing Focus Areas

The first thing we see in the Focus product is the ability to see focus areas in a hierarchy. Of course we could show Focus Areas in a a ‘general’ hierarchy, but more often than not, these Focus Areas have some organizational context.

Here is the hierarchy in Focus:

We can assume that these Focus Areas exist in the broader context of the company, but what if we want to break focus areas out across Departments, Portfolios, Product Lines, and Products?

In Dotwork, we can break out our Focus Areas (and any other objects) out into their specific organizational context.

And of course we can nest Focus Areas. In this case, we’re actually looking at Focus Areas for ‘Banking’ as well as child Focus Areas that are actually owned by the individual Products - Personal Finance and Credit Card

And of course we can drill into anything in this view - we can navigate to specific spaces (e.g. Banking) or open up any of these objects inline to edit their details

So now we have our Focus Areas for the ‘Banking’ Portfolio and for the Personal Finance and Credit Card Product

Now we’ll dig into the two primary views unveiled in Focus - the first is a rollup of work progress and the other gives visibility into Goal status.

Viewing Work for Focus Areas

Within focus areas, we see that ‘Focus’ provides a work roll-up view across anything related to the Focus area. In this case, across work items in Jira or Jira Align.

Here’s what it looks like in Focus:

In Dotwork, we'll see a library of pre-set objects, but objects can be customized - including the tabs and the view we can render in those tabs.

To get the same experience, we’ve created a few new tabs on the Focus Area object type: Goals, Work, and Funds.

Below we’ve recreated the same views and reports we see in the Focus work tab.

At the top we see overview cards based on the status and target dates. Below that we see a progress bar broken out to show work items that are completed, in progress, or have yet to be started. Then we see a trend chart that shows the count of work items by status over time.

And lastly, we get a list of work items (some are projects and some are initiatives).

This list of work items can show relationships to objects in Dotwork or any 3rd party tools (including Jira or Jira Align). In this case we’re seeing objects that live in Dotwork, but have their own connections to work in Jira.

Viewing Goals for Focus Areas

Similarly, in Focus we see a tab for Goals that rolls up status across goals instead of work. Here’s what we see in the tab in Focus:

In Dotwork we can generate an identical view based on the relationship of goals (or Objectives, or OKRs) back to Focus Areas. We’ll render the same overview cards at the top and a progress card to show goals ‘On Track’. In our view, we’ve also added ‘Goals Achieved’ and ‘Needs Attention’ to be a bit more specific.

Next to that we see a status timeline that shows the status of goals over time.

Lastly, we have a list of goals associated to the Focus Area with details on status, score, target month, and owner. We also decided to include this as a tree so you can drill in to any goal and see associated objects (in this case, key results and objectives)

Of course, when something can do just about anything, it’s difficult to know where to start. Soon, Dotwork will be available and accessible for anyone who wants to start with a solution like this - or maybe OKRs, ProductOps, Product Portfolio Management, etc…

But while we’re early, we’re looking for organizations who are thoughtful about their ways of working - who feel like no tool really fits. You know what you’re doing is working, but it feels like docs, decks, and spreadsheets (or even custom-built solutions) aren’t cutting it.

Let’s talk! We’ll build a free, custom demo if it feels like a good fit for our design partnership program.

Solving what we call the ‘Perennial Problem’

Organizations are snowflakes. Especially in the ways they develop, plan, and execute strategy. More importantly, they’re different today than they were just a few years ago. “Change is the only constant”.

And yet, we build static solutions for moving targets, we dilute our solutions with feature bloat to essentially do less for more people, and we treat organizations as predictable systems.

Solutions should be designed to mold to organizations as complex adaptive systems and solve the ‘perennial’ problem - the ability to weather the organizational changing of seasons.

• As organizations adapt, can their tools adapt with them?
• As organizations differ, can the solution solve specific, novel problems unique to their business?
• As people come and go, can the organizational memory remain intact?

We believe adaptive tools are the future.

We believe that software should be lasting, solve unique problems, and be highly-contextual.

If that resonates with you, then you probably feel like the tools of today never quite solve the problem. We’d love to hear you! And if you're interested in working with us to make your own dream strategy view come to life, apply for the design partnership!