How to make work visible and improve alignment (with or without AI)

Making work visible is crucial for minimizing misalignment and maximizing efficiency. Indeed, a lack of visibility can lead to soul-crushing amounts of wasted time and energy. “I met with a car manufacturer who has several brands under their umbrella,” says Sven Peters, AI Evangelist at Atlassian. “Two different brands had their engineers developing essentially the same braking system for more than a month before they realized it.” Collectively, they would’ve accomplished twice as much if they hadn’t been duplicating efforts.

And they’re not alone. Atlassian’s 2025 State of Teams report revealed that roughly half of knowledge workers say teams at their company tend to unknowingly work on the same things.

In small companies, people keep their work aligned simply by talking to each other. But in larger companies, just figuring out who to talk to can be tough. And even then, that person may be several time zones away from you. Let’s examine some ways to improve visibility at enterprise scale, including methods that are only possible now because of AI.

Moving beyond transparency toward visibility

You might think that a culture of open work, and the psychological safety that underpins it, would solve the alignment problem. Although keeping records unlocked by default and encouraging cross-departmental collaboration fosters transparency, that isn’t the whole story – it’s certainly possible to have transparency without visibility.

“Another customer, a bank, had integrated Jira with Jira Product Discovery and Jira Service Management,” Sven recalls. “Management thought the teams were aligned now because everyone could see everything.” In reality, however, the teams were still working in silos. They weren’t proactively surfacing goals or problems to each other, resulting in a frustrating cycle of do-overs and wasted work.

If transparency is the extent to which people can access the information they need, and discoverability is the extent to which people can find additional information via search, then visibility is the extent to which people intentionally share relevant information with others. It’s one thing to keep your project plan unlocked and easy to find (which you absolutely should do). It’s another thing to tag your collaborators on the page to bring them in, and flag it with adjacent teams.

Four ways to make work in progress visible

Open up and integrate team collaboration tools

It probably goes without saying that systems should be integrated with each other as much as possible so it’s easy to trace a piece of work through all the various tools it might touch. This is where the value of standardization comes through. If some teams are using Jira to track work while others are on MS Project or just use a spreadsheet, that will limit the extent to which you can connect the tools, and therefore constrain visibility.

From there, make sure Jira projects, Confluence spaces, and Bitbucket repos are unlocked for read access by default. That way, people can find and follow the work that relates to their own. Here’s Sven again: “I follow 50 different projects, which always blows people away. I get updates pushed to me every Monday morning, so I can get caught up on everything without attending status meetings or asking people for updates.” If that sounds overwhelming, you may find it easier to receive individual updates as they happen, rather than taking it all in at once.

Announce important project milestones

When a project kicks off, share an announcement with any team you’ll be collaborating with or whose work will be affected. Also consider teams who won’t be touched directly by the project, but might appreciate being informed in case it becomes relevant in the future. Include an invitation for feedback and comments. How could the project be tweaked to deliver a bigger impact? Are there potential synergies with other teams’ work? Or potential conflicts? Now is the time to raise issues and ideas, before you’re too deep into the work to change things up.

For longer projects (say, those spanning more than a quarter or two), come back with updates as you hit major milestones. Repeat the call for feedback in case new opportunities or issues have come up. And be sure to call out your project team and thank them by name for their work thus far.

Do this as an internal blog post, email, or video message (more on that later). Bonus points if your department head or CEO can give it a quick shout-out in the next all-hands, too.

Tag collaborators on relevant artifacts

“I’m always adding people to my projects and pages when I want them to stay informed for whatever reason,” says Sven. “People appreciate being looped in, even if they don’t follow the project closely.” Here’s what that looks like on a tactical level:

• High-level – Add collaborators as followers on Jira projects, Confluence spaces, and Bitbucket repos to give them visibility into that workstream as a whole.
• Mid-level – Surface roadmaps, strategy one-pagers, messaging docs, and technical designs to teams whose work intersects with yours or works “in the same neighborhood.”
• Granular – @mention or tag people on pages, commits, pull requests, issues, agile boards, and other records when you want them to get notified about updates to that specific artifact.

Be sure to include your manager on those high- and mid-level artifacts, even if you’re sharing regular updates in team meetings. Giving them an easy way to look at your work (whenever its convenient for them) will make your 1-on-1 conversations more productive. Plus, making your work visible ensures they won’t overlook any highlights at annual review time.

Use video to humanize and add context

Consider using Loom to create and share updates via video. This works best for quick, ad-hoc project updates and longer, higher-level updates that cover a lot of different projects. For example, some leaders at Atlassian record weekly Looms that they share with their entire org. They cover goals, strategy, new work kicking off, customer anecdotes, big wins, small wins, losses, and emerging opportunities. Not only are these videos quick to create (just start talking!), team members can watch them at 2x speed.

Video also offers the advantage of seeing faces and hearing tone of voice. That’s a win for good old-fashioned human connection and team cohesion. For distributed teams, recording a short Loom and popping it into your chat channel might be a richer and more enjoyable way to do daily stand-ups compared to conference calls or text-only methods. And because Loom generates a transcript, the contents of each video are discoverable via search.

Level up! Using AI to turn transparency into visibility

So far, we’ve been talking about making our own work more visible to others. But what about the other way around? Even if your colleagues haven’t proactively surfaced their work to you, you can still gain visibility into it using AI. A sales rep who wants to stay on top of the product development pipeline can configure an AI agent using Rovo that flags new user stories, for example. Similarly, you might use AI agents to:

• Summarize projects
• Flag new projects related to your work that you might want to follow
• Track specific Confluence spaces, repos, or shared network drives
• Generate a weekly summary of updates across the projects you follow and post it on a Confluence page, chat channel, or deliver via email

Information from past projects can also be useful, thanks to the power of AI for search and analysis. Remember the car maker who accidentally developed the same brake system twice? They took that lesson to heart and now use Rovo to avoid running duplicate wind-tunnel tests, which are notoriously expensive. When the need for a test arises, Rovo scours company archives, which comprise multiple systems and file types, for past tests that used the same parameters. Every time a match is identified, the company saves both time and money.

In less dramatic (but perhaps more relatable) fashion, the Jira project team at Atlassian uses Rovo’s AI agents to create a feedback analyzer, making customer sentiment and pain points more visible. AI also comes in handy when teams embark on a new project. It can look through information about past marketing campaigns and pull out lessons learned, or analyze repos and knowledge bases to summarize past development work in that area of the product and identify risks.

Whether it means creating an AI agent to alert customer support whenever a new development epic is created, or sharing your project plan with adjacent teams, improving visibility requires intention and action. Fortunately, none of it is hard. Start your visibility journey by sharing these tips with the teams around you, and set yourselves on the path to less stressful and better-coordinated work.