Leaving a 12-year identity behind: Dom Price on what comes after quitting

Executive overview

When your job title and your sense of self have merged over 12 years, leaving isn't just a career decision — it's an identity crisis. Dom Price left Atlassian without a plan, and spent the months after sitting with discomfort, rebuilding structure from scratch, and resisting the urge to resolve uncertainty too quickly.

The conversation covers two threads: the personal psychology of a major career exit, and the leadership mistakes Dom is witnessing as organisations struggle to absorb AI-driven change.

Clarity rarely precedes the leap — it only becomes possible after you stop.

The decision to leave

• Regular 90-day reflection using the five L's: loved, longed for, loathed, learnt, laughed at.
• The "loath" trend line was international travel — time away from twin boys and wife — and it wasn't fixable without changing the role itself.
• The longing was to go deeper with clients, not parachute in and out.
• Clarity never fully arrived; the decision came from instinct and accumulated weight, not a clean moment of certainty.
• The realisation: he wouldn't figure out the next thing while still inside the current one.

Identity loss and the discomfort that follows

• "Dom Price, Work Futurist at Atlassian" had fused into a single identity — removing one word felt like losing the whole wrapper.
• Early weeks swung between exposure (feeling like nothing without the label) and excitement (freedom, blank space).
• The blank space quickly became its own problem: no Slack pings, no structure, no adrenaline.
• Strategy: limit rumination time, build new focus (school runs, dad life, husband), then use trusted friends for spitballing — not daily processing.
• A friend's blunt question — "Why are you looking for the job? Why not just a job?" — cut through the noise better than months of reflection had.

Decision criteria for what comes next

• First question: job, place, or people? (Honest answer: all three — then prioritise.)
• Key anchor: "I really like my kitchen." — code for not needing a higher income, which removed the pull toward international roles.
• Filters narrowed to: domestic, smaller, growing, in-person some of the time.
• Instead of applying for roles, he used his network to "try before you buy" — working with companies in an advisory capacity to test fit before committing.

Three leadership patterns struggling with AI change

• The tenure bunker: leaders who believe they can outlast AI by keeping their heads down for four or five more years. At least they're honest about it.
• The transformation fatigue cohort: organisations that have spent tens of millions on agile, culture, and digital transformations and feel no different — now being asked to hand another $20M to consultants for an AI roadmap.
• The underestimators: leaders treating AI as a call-centre efficiency play, not a fundamental rebuild of how the business operates. Example: one financial services firm rolled out AI to reduce call times while a competitor used it to proactively apply for better mortgages on customers' behalf.

The human system hasn't kept up

• Most organisations invested in technology systems but left the human operating system — how people actually work — unchanged.
• Giving people a Ferrari doesn't help if they've never driven.
• One A/B test: teams with AI were 35% more productive — and had a 50% increase in meetings. They saved time, didn't know what to do with it, and filled it with low-value discussion.
• Productivity gains only matter if you know what you reinvested them in.

What good leadership looks like right now

• The best metric isn't productivity — it's a balanced scorecard: safety, timeliness, profitability, customer experience, team wellness, relevance.
• Relevance requires high learning velocity, not just efficiency.
• The leaders getting it right are rolling their sleeves up and doing it with their teams, not to them — and saying openly, "I don't know."
• The emerging superpower: authentic storytelling — here's what I tried, here's what happened, here's what we're doing next, here's what you can borrow.
• Chest-beating certainty is a liability. Humility paired with a clear framework is the durable model.