Agile Journeys is an ongoing series of candid conversations with Agile professionals—from transformation coaches and solution architects to product owners, consultants, and marketplace innovators. We explore the realities of Agile adoption, tooling, scaling work, team challenges, and the human elements behind organizational change.
Our goal: share practitioner wisdom so others can learn, adapt, and improve.
In this installment, we sat down with Mike Maurer — Atlassian expert, Agile Product Owner, founder of Atlas Leap, and certified A-CSPO, CPRE, and CSM. Mike has spent over a decade inside development teams, bridging the gap between business requirements, tooling usability, and workflow design. Today, he helps organizations streamline Jira and Confluence environments that have grown messy over time.
At Catapult Labs, we’re especially interested in how experts like Mike think about developer experience, tooling hygiene, and the evolution of the Atlassian ecosystem.
Mike’s journey into Atlassian wasn’t planned—it emerged out of necessity.
“Every project I joined used Jira or Confluence. But almost all of them had messy setups or broken knowledge systems.”
After years as a technical writer, business analyst, and Scrum Product Owner—working on large-scale programs including SAFE implementations—Mike became the unofficial Atlassian “go-to” in every project.
Eventually, that pain point became his business:
“Teams didn’t need six-month consulting engagements. They needed someone who could show up, understand their problem, and fix something small that made a big impact.”
That idea became Atlas Leap, where Mike’s “office hours” consulting model delivers practical fixes, migrations, and configuration clean-ups for teams that feel stuck.
Despite Atlassian’s ubiquity, Mike sees a recurring problem:
“Admins activate everything. Users get lost. And when instances age—especially Confluence—knowledge becomes impossible to retrieve.”
His philosophy?
✔️ Start simple
✔️ Clean up before adding anything
✔️ Reduce configuration wherever possible
As Mike puts it:
“Kick out features you don’t need. Don’t create custom fields unless you use them. Don’t build workflows from scratch if templates already work.”
One of Mike’s favorite examples involved halving the number of Jira statuses in a legacy workflow:
“Nobody understood which status meant what. We cleaned it up, removed unused fields, added validations, and automated transitions. Team satisfaction skyrocketed.”
Another involved a 2006 Confluence space—one of the earliest ever created:
“Search was unusable. Page analytics didn’t work. Archiving was impossible on Data Center. Migrating to Cloud was the only viable way to improve discoverability.”
These aren’t shiny transformation programs—they’re unglamorous, foundational changes that unlock efficiency. And in Mike’s view, that’s where most teams need help.
Mike credits Atlassian’s early shift to cloud as transformational—but warns that admin-side complexity has grown fast:
“The pace of development is crazy—sometimes too fast. But it enables incredible capabilities.”
He also highlights two major trends shaping the next era:
Especially in Germany, where data residency and AI security concerns slow adoption—but inevitable change is coming.
Mike sees potential in Rovo AI—especially as a sparring partner for knowledge retrieval and decision support.
”In five years you may talk more with agents than colleagues—if implementations mature.”
When asked about rising interest in Developer Experience (DevEx), Mike sees automation as key:
“Developers want automated pipelines, clean systems, and fewer manual tests. If administration is done well, teams can focus on their work instead of clicking around.”
His advice aligns with our DevEx research:
fix the environment first so people can execute.
Mike boils it down to one thing:
“Keep it simple. Clean first. Turn things off before adding more.”
In other words:
Stop: treating Atlassian tools as infinite configuration playgrounds.
Start: removing, simplifying, and auditing usage.
Mike sees two big opportunities:
🚀 Helping customers migrate from Data Center to Cloud
✨ Helping teams fully leverage features they don’t know exist
“Most teams only use 50% of what’s possible. Showing them the rest—without overcomplicating things—is where value happens.”
Mike’s story reinforces a truth we hear often in Agile Journeys:
✨ Sometimes transformation isn’t about adding frameworks—it’s about clearing the clutter.
Follow Mike on LinkedIn and learn more about Atlas Leap’s consulting approach.
Explore more conversations in the Agile Journeys series on the Catapult Labs blog.