Launching Jira and Confluence Premium Pricing Plan

Overview

In early 2019, after almost a year of extensive market research and customer interviews, Atlassian made an important company strategic decision to introduce the Premium pricing plan to our 3 core cloud products: Jira Software, Jira Service Desk and Confluence. This strategy would empower teams with more complex needs–often at larger organizations with higher willingness to pay–to get work done more efficiently at scale.

In order to launch this plan to the market in early May 2019, a large program of 6+ teams from Marketing, Commerce, Product, Field Operation to Finance and Legal spanning multiple timezones worked closely together for 6 months from end to end.

Role and Team

At the time I was part of the Commerce team (sitting under Buyer Experience). Our role in this project was to build a brand-new upgrade and downgrade experience for our billing admins (prior to this, we only had 1 standard plan for these 3 core products). My role in this project was to lead the specific user experience design in the billing flow and to cooperate with a group of other designers across the end to end journey.

My immediate scrum team: 1 product manager, 1 scrum master, 6 engineers, 1 supporting UX designer (added half-way in to increase capacity), 1 content designer.

Problem space & how might we statement

For our Commerce scrum team, we needed to onboard our new product plan to our billing system to ensure that our customers can manage them (upgrade/downgrade, add users, renew, sign-up, cancel, etc) and internally, Atlassian can accurately report usage & adoption in addition to maintaining a single source of truth for product and pricing information.

As our team set out to deliver this project, our core UX objective was built around the following statement: “How might we enable our billing admins to perform the upgrade/downgrade tasks with the absolute confidence (because it’s financial-related) and ease (because admins has multiple tasks to get through their day)?”

Working with a bigger program team, I also needed to ensure the admin experience extend beyond the billing flow to earlier discovery (marketing and in-product messaging) and sometimes later (when support needs to involve in complex cases).

Process

Competitive analysis research: As this was the new feature for our core billing platform, we needed to understand the industry common practices for plan changing experience. The key B2B products we looked at were Slack, Dropbox, G-Suite and Microsoft Office 365. We also talked to the Bitbucket and Trello teams (using different billing systems at the time) to understand how their admins have been performing this task as a baseline.

Personas: The job of an admin varies greatly depending on the team size and delegation. Working with the research team, we assembled the key user types for this experience.

Design principles: To ensure our end to end design provide a consistent value and experience, I worked with other designers in the program to come up with a set of 4 principles. This helped tremendously throughout the project as we sparred (aka critiqued) and needed to make difficult tradeoffs with other stakeholders.

User flow: From an initial set of 4 key user flows (monthly-cycle upgrade, monthly downgrade, annual upgrade, annual downgrade), this exercise with my scrum team helped unravel a series of additional complex use cases which were caused partly by different customers' billing requirements (pay by credit card or ACH, net30 or without, new/trial versus existing paying users, etc) and partly by our complex billing system constraints.

High level journey map: Once we identified the primary “micro” user task flow, I workshopped with other designers to map out the “macro” end to end journey across marketing, product and billing. This helped us identify early gaps so that each workstream can plan accordingly.

Screen design v1: Applying the extensive components from the open-sourced Atlassian Design System and partnering closely with my content designer, I produced the initial flow as a template so that subsequent flows can follow. (see design in the Figma prototype below)

Frequent design sparring: There were 3 types of sparring that I tried to do for each sprint: scrum sparring (with PM and engineers), end to end sparring (with other designers in the project), weekly SF-office design sparrings (with other designers in the office for fresh minds).
Rapid user testing for additional feedback: With the help from our research team, we set up a quick user test on UserTesting with 10 participants to gain additional insight. This step was extremely helpful for our content iteration (since our flows were quite content and number heavy) and it still allowed us to move quickly throughout the sprint.
Iteration and additional rounds sparring
(Then last 4 steps repeated for the subsequent flows)
Showcasing in working group (presentation and writing): Once the final iteration was made, I documented the end to end journeys and presented them to the bigger group. This was crucially important for teams to stay aligned on what we’re shipping to our customers.
Hand off to engineer & design QA during and post build

Design snapshot:

Figma prototype link

Result and impact

MVP completed in time for the Premium plan launch which was a huge milestone for the company
The task completion rate for upgrade was at 85%, downgrade at 72% (downgrade was lower due to the fact that once users see the features they’re giving up in step 2, they cancel the flow - or decide to talk to support instead)
No surge in customer support ticket, except for the complex use case where high touch interaction is preferred
6 months after launch, all premium successful upgrade for existing customers contributed up to a significant uplift in Cloud MRR (one of key company’s OKRs) for Jira Software, Confluence and Jira Service Desk, which then plays a big role in Atlassian crossing the $1B revenue in FY20.

Learnings and key influences:

Working with complex systems and making it digestible for users
Technical/business/design tradeoff negotiation using our own Atlassian Play DACI framework
Communication in a large program to ensure end to end quality
Laid out the design framework for subsequent projects when we launched other product plans