A high-stakes task lands, the clock is running, and three questions start flying around your team. Who has done this before? Who can we trust with it? And who is actually free to help right now? Messages pile up, meetings multiply, and the decision slows to a crawl. The frustrating part is that the expertise exists somewhere in your organization. You just cannot see it.
That is the gap Yelyzaveta Burda set out to close at the Work Evolution Summit. She is part of the product team at Elevatic, and she volunteered to give the talk herself, nerves and all, because she was genuinely excited about what her team is building. The product, Meridian People and Skillshare, is still in active development and due to roll out around October, so this was a look at a vision taking shape rather than a finished tool. The idea behind it is worth your attention regardless of which product you eventually use.
The Expertise Is There. You Just Cannot Find It.
Every company strives to know its people, and in some ways it does. The trouble shows up when the stakes are high and speed matters, because then it stops being about knowing and starts being about accessing the right knowledge instantly. Your experts are real, but their expertise is effectively invisible. It sits hidden inside your tools, scattered across Jira tickets, buried in paperwork, and locked in people’s heads where no search can reach it.
Yelyzaveta drew the conclusion that reframes the whole problem: “The competitive advantage is not what your organization knows. It’s how fast can you find the people who know it”.
Read that against your own last fire drill. The knowledge was probably in the building the entire time. The cost was the hours you spent finding it.
Flipping the Search: Let Expertise Find You
Now picture the reverse. Instead of chasing down who might know something, you see across your entire organization at a glance, who has the right experience, the right skills, and the right availability. That map is built from four sources working together: the skills people declare about themselves, the work they prove every day, the systems where they already work, and their verified credentials. Combined, those form a living, evolving picture of what your organization can actually do.“instead of searching for the right expertise, expertise can find you”
The practical design matters as much as the vision. The people and skills hub sits directly inside Atlassian, so there is no complex rollout and no disruption to how people work. You connect the systems you already rely on, such as Workday, Engage, and LinkedIn, and profiles come to life as the data flows in. Employees stay in control throughout, free to add skills and refine how they show up, so from day one you are surfacing knowledge that was already there rather than asking anyone to fill in another form.
Two Ways It Shows Up in Real Work
Yelyzaveta made it concrete with two scenarios. In the first, meet Sarah, a developer assigned to implement payment callback handling, slightly outside her expertise. The work sits in Jira, and two days in there is no real progress, not because she lacks ability but because she lacks that specific experience. Meridian detects the delay, understands the context, and proactively reaches out, suggesting two colleagues, Michael and Crystal, who have solved this kind of problem before. Sarah never leaves the system she works in. She shares the work item or schedules a quick meeting, and minutes later she is unblocked. Better still, she builds real skills in the process, so next time she is the one the system suggests to a struggling colleague.
The second scenario is the centralized search. Justin is staffing a new high-priority project and needs people with expertise in electronic payments, with no time to guess or ask around. He opens the Knowledge Navigator and asks a plain question, who can help with payment callbacks. Meridian returns the best-fit experts, ranked by relevance, backed by real data, and expressed as a clear fit score. Crucially, it weighs availability too, which Yelyzaveta summed up in the line that stuck: “right expertise at the wrong time is still the wrong answer”
In seconds Justin connects with the right people and builds a strong team from day one.
From a Skills Database to a Living Capability Map
Step back from the individual searches and a bigger payoff appears. For the first time, leadership gets a true, real-time view of the organization’s capability, where skills are strong, where they are fragile, and where risk is quietly building. That lets leaders act early, strengthen the weak spots, invest in the skills they actually lack, and balance their teams, which is the shift from reacting to problems toward actively shaping what the organization can do. The emphasis Yelyzaveta kept returning to is that this is not a static skills database that goes stale the week after you build it. It lives inside the workflow, learning and adapting so it reflects your real capabilities rather than last year’s.
The Honest Caveats
What made the session credible was how openly Yelyzaveta handled the questions, especially since the product is not finished. Asked whether it assigns tickets automatically, she was clear that it does not, and reminded the room that the feature is still being shaped and that she wanted their feedback to take back to the team. Matching is based on two things, your genuine time availability and the relevance of your past work to the specific task.
Availability drew the sharpest question. It pulls from Outlook, which captures your meetings and your time off, but as one attendee pointed out, nobody blocks three months in their calendar to show they are committed to a long project. Yelyzaveta agreed, and her answer was the honest one. The tool does not replace real conversation. It makes that conversation easier by pointing you to someone who is likely available and has done the work before, and even if that person cannot take the task, they can still share what they know. On where the data comes from, another attendee guessed it himself, and she confirmed it draws on all of it, system data, self-declared skills, proven work, verified credentials, and integrations like Workday.
Yelyzaveta closed on the thought that frames the whole effort. The organization that wins is not the one with the most talent, but the one that can activate its talent faster and smarter, at scale, at the right moment. So ask yourself the question her talk really poses. The next time a critical task stalls on your team, how many hours will you lose finding the person who could have unblocked it in ten minutes?
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About Life in Codes
Life in Codes is on a mission: to support organizations of all kinds to work in a more productive way. That means smart tools, healthy practices, and training the people. As an Atlassian Solutions Partner active in Romania, Estonia, Belgium, UK and the UAE, with our team spread across Europe.
Our client roster includes start-ups, SMEs, large financial institutions like SWIFT, government organizations like the European Commission, and logistics providers such as DHL.Our expertise spans a wide range of solutions, including ITSM, Agile Project Management, Digitalization, Knowledge Management, next-level customer support, DevOps, cloud migration and Rovo AI agents.
We firmly believe that working smart is universal – regardless of industry, company size, or team composition. – our diverse client base is a testament to this philosophy. Whether you’re a tech-focused team or not, Atlassian tools, coupled with our expertise, can significantly enhance your productivity and collaboration.
At the end of the day, we believe in the power of teamwork and we aspire to help people reach their full potential. By partnering with Life in Codes, you’re not just adopting new tools – you’re embracing a more efficient, collaborative, and successful way of working. Schedule an appointment
