The Issue #11 Field Scan routed you to Ken Exner for the Atlassian AI design roles. That routing was wrong. The actual design leadership chain is fully staffed, predates Exner by months, and includes two role-specific hiring contacts. Corrected routing below.
Corrected contacts
Rovo & AI — Principal Product Designer (priority). Reach David Hoang, VP, Head of Design for Rovo & AI and Ecosystem. He's publicly active — spoke at Team '26, amplified the Jira AI hire, maintains a personal site. He hasn't publicly claimed this req, so reference the posted role directly and name the design problem underneath it. The posting first appeared on syndicated boards around September 15. Ten days old. Early window, thin pipeline. This is the higher-priority outreach.
Warm path: No mutual connections recovered. Cold outreach, but Hoang's public output — his personal site, Team '26 talk, LinkedIn posts on AI design — gives you hooks that make cold feel current. Lead with something he's said publicly.
If Hoang doesn't respond within five business days, reach Carola Pescio Canale, Head of Design for Rovo & AI, and the most likely direct manager for this role. No mutual connections located. Her LinkedIn activity is sparser than Hoang's, so hook on the Rovo product challenge directly.
Jira AI — Senior Design Manager (secondary, time-sensitive). Reach Kayla Carlson, Design Director for Jira's core experience. She's the identified hiring manager — the role was publicly posted with an open invitation to reach out, DMs and calendar open. Posted July 3. Nearly three months old. At enterprise scale, a management search running this long is either deep in pipeline or stalled. If you're going to reach out, do it this week.
Warm path: Carlson's "DMs and calendar are open" is itself a warm signal — she's inviting cold outreach, which changes the calculus. No mutual connections recovered, but reference her hiring post directly. That post is your hook.
His org doesn't own them. A message to him about Rovo or Jira AI tells the recipient you haven't done the research.
The contacts above are what you came for. The sequence below gives you the org context to speak credibly about where Atlassian's AI design function sits and how it got there.
The sequence underneath
Seven events recovered, in order. Two changed the trajectory; the rest confirmed it.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| ~Nov 2024 | Pescio Canale joins the Rovo design team |
| Sep 2025 | Sutton promoted to CDO — described as a "new, expanded role" |
| Nov 2025 | Yehoshua joins as Chief Product and AI Officer, owning Teamwork Collection (Jira, Confluence, Loom, Trello) and central AI including Rovo |
| Apr 2026 | Sutton announces Spalter as SVP, Head of Design for Teamwork Collection |
| Jul 2–3, 2026 | Jira AI Senior Design Manager goes live with Carlson as hiring manager |
| Aug 6, 2026 | Exner announced as CPO, Enterprise & Emerging |
| ~Sep 15, 2026 | Principal Product Designer, Rovo & AI first appears on syndicated boards |
The two trajectory-changing events: Yehoshua's arrival in November 2025 created the organizational territory these roles sit in. Spalter's appointment in April 2026 installed the design leadership layer between CDO and product-area design leads. Everything else — Sutton's CDO promotion, Pescio Canale's earlier Rovo hire, the role postings — confirmed a design org that was already building before Exner's name surfaced.
What Exner's appointment actually covers. His published remit: Service Collection, Enterprise Foundations, Public Sector. Jira and Rovo sit in Yehoshua's Teamwork Collection and AI territory. At Elastic, Exner had design reporting to him. At Atlassian, there's a CDO (Sutton), an SVP of Design for the relevant product area (Spalter), and a VP of Design for Rovo specifically (Hoang). No structural opening for Exner on the design side of these products.
The Jira AI search predates Exner by a month. Carlson's hiring post went up July 2–3. Exner started August 4. He didn't create this requisition, and nothing in the public record connects him to it.
The Rovo principal role appeared six weeks after Exner, but the Rovo design team has been building since at least November 2024. The timing overlap is coincidence until someone ties them together publicly, and no one has.
The design chain
Sutton (CDO) → Spalter (SVP, Head of Design, Teamwork Collection) → then it forks:
- Jira AI: Kayla Carlson, Design Director. Identified as hiring manager for the Senior Design Manager role.
- Rovo & AI: David Hoang, VP, Head of Design → Carola Pescio Canale, Head of Design for Rovo & AI.
Formal reporting lines among Spalter, Hoang, Pescio Canale, and Carlson aren't published. The title hierarchy and product-area ownership are clear enough to route outreach correctly.
What breaks this prediction
The routing is wrong if Atlassian recently moved Rovo or Jira design under Exner's Enterprise & Emerging org without updating public records. Possible but unlikely — the Teamwork Collection label is current on the management page, Yehoshua's scope was confirmed in a July 2026 interview, and Spalter's appointment to lead design for that collection is from April.
It also breaks if Hoang or Pescio Canale left Atlassian in the last few weeks without updating their profiles. Check their LinkedIn activity before sending.
For the Inflection Point
The engagement package should route through Hoang for Rovo and Carlson for Jira AI. Positioning archetype: enterprise platform with AI-native product requirements.
Rovo & AI principal role: Lead with forward-looking artifacts and Agentic Labs. Rovo is an AI teammate embedded across Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket — the principal designer is solving trust and delegation across contexts where AI acts on behalf of the user inside existing workflows. That maps directly to the Trust essay's five handoffs and to the Carrier IQ production work. The specific dimension that makes this role hard: the trust model has to hold across products where the AI has different capabilities, different data access, and different stakes. A user delegating a Jira workflow update is a different trust decision than delegating a Confluence page edit, and the designer has to make that feel coherent rather than fractured. Hoang is a design leader who thinks publicly about craft. Lead with the design problem.
Jira AI management role: Lead with Alibaba enterprise-scale leadership proof. Support with TinyFish bridge narrative (agentic product shipped 0→1, past tense, returning to design to apply that depth). This is a management hire — the buyer is evaluating whether you can build and lead a design team inside a complex product org, not whether you can design AI surfaces.
The Atlassian Design Interview Handbook documents a structured loop: portfolio review, product thinking, craft excellence, and a possible triad interview with Product and Engineering. Prep should account for all four.
- Yehoshua on agents as users: Atlassian's Chief Product and AI Officer publicly describes agents as direct users of Atlassian software and names context and accountability as design problems, which gives you language to mirror in the Rovo outreach.
- Atlassian's interview structure is published: The Design Interview Handbook documents the full loop including a triad interview with Product and Engineering counterparts for senior roles — one of the few enterprise companies that publishes this level of process detail.
- Exner's Elastic departure is SEC-documented: His resignation as Elastic CPO was effective July 17, 2026 per the proxy filing, meaning he had less than three weeks between companies — relevant if his Enterprise & Emerging org posts its own design roles later.
- Agentic Labs case routes are broken: The September 20 portfolio inspection found the three approved Labs applications reachable via direct URLs but returning 404 on their case-page routes — verify these are fixed before any Atlassian outreach that deep-links to them.