Bending the growth curve for Jira Software in 2023
Introduction
Atlassian's Jira Software, a versatile project management tool for both software development and non-technical teams has been the trusted solution for more than 100k customers worldwide for almost two decades. In recent years, as Atlassian has steadily scaled in operation, we realized several challenges in the complex Jira Software’s customer journey - especially around the evaluation and conversion periods. These challenges were categorized into three main buckets:
Organizational silos and experience gaps: The company suffered from major organizational silos that led to significant gaps in the design experience. These silos hindered a cohesive customer journey and presented design and technology challenges.
Legacy design & tech debt: The presence of legacy design and tech debt further exacerbated the problem. These issues existed in the gaps between teams, with no clear ownership, or the barriers to resolution were too high. For example, our signup and purchasing flows have not been redesigned for years and they had a lot of backend constraints & dependencies.
Impact on growth: The gaps in the customer journey had a direct impact on Jira Software's growth rate (our top revenue-generation product). Even though this slower growth could also be accounted for by the overall slowing economy in late 2022/early 2023, through our initial data and qualitative research, we knew there were big opportunities internally that we could work on to improve the overall experience.
To tackle these gnarly challenges, we initiated the "Jira Land Program," aimed at plugging the drop-offs in the customer purchasing funnel from initial discovery to the ultimate purchase decision.
As the lead designer with experience in both product and service design, I was assigned to drive this work forward from its inception since March 2023, in partnership with our senior product and engineering leaders - whom report directly to our President.
Phase 1: Gathering, forming, and connecting the teams
To address the multifaceted issues within the customer journey, I undertook the following key responsibilities:
1. Mapping complex customer journey: I began by gathering the entire end-to-end customer journey, dissecting each stage and touchpoint. With the help of a tool called TheyDo which specializes in helping large organizations manage their multi-layer journeys, my colleague and I were able to map out not just the visual artifacts that our customers see, but also the underlying metrics, research insights and the teams behind them.
A zoomed-out view of the multi-layered customer journey
2. Facilitating stakeholder workshops: An initial workshop was conducted to align the stakeholders and begin the process of breaking down the silos and fostering collaboration. I played the facilitator role for most of these workshops, many of which involved key leaders in the organization.
Our key stakeholders across the entire customer journey. By putting all the screens across teams up on the wall, we could all tell how siloed we were.
3. Building a collaborative cross-functional team: to combat the silo challenge across multiple orgs, I formed and led a dedicated group of 12 designers. I organized them into three distinct teams:
The Find Team focuses on improving top-of-funnel experiences, including website pages and the sign-up process for the free edition.
The Use Team concentrates on enhancing the onboarding experience for new users once they land in Jira Software.
The Buy Team looks at the upgrade experience to the Standard edition trial and the purchase experience at the end of the trial.
*I acted as a design team lead, not a manager
4. Diving deep into the customer problems across the funnel to truly understand what were causing the drop-offs across the entire customer journey:
I initiated several research efforts and partnered closely with the research team to understand the user behavior at each stage of their decision making process.
On the quantitative side, I supported the PMs and data analysts in analyzing the patterns that we were able to collect and this helped us in identifying the most impactful areas to tackle first.
As a lead, my job was to make sure I connected all these data points across the end-to-end journey so that our stakeholders could see the bigger picture of what really caused the slower growth of Jira.
5. Shaping the design strategy & vision: To provide a clear direction for the teams as well as to communicate to leadership on where we were heading, I led an initial design sprint that unpacked the customer and business problems throughout the entire “Land” journey and came out with an inspiring design strategy and clickable prototype vision of what the ideal experience should look and feel like. The Loom video we produced (12 designers + me) was well received by a variety of stakeholder groups and the constructive feedback pushed us towards a better direction for execution.
Our design strategy and vision Loom was widely watched and commented across the company
Phase 2: Moving from strategy to execution as one large experiment team
After the design sprint, I worked closely with my product and engineering lead partners to help the Find, Use and Buy teams break down the key ideas into an impactful experiment roadmap for the upcoming quarters. Our support spread across 3 main areas:
Problem framing: we supported each team in identifying and comprehending the most significant problems within their respective customer phases. When we hit a wall, we would go to our data science and research partners to gather more evidence.
Roadmap prioritization: we assisted the teams in prioritizing their roadmaps, which increased their velocity and ability to address critical issues efficiently.
Running ongoing workshops, design crits and reviewing weekly design Looms: as someone whose core responsibility was to connect the dots and ensure a seamless end-to-end experience, I ran different rituals to ensure design quality and to connect the designers into a healthy working unit.
Phase 3: Supporting the team through major org changes & raising the bar of execution
The efforts to transform the end-to-end customer journey resulted in a significant organizational restructure. An evolved, dedicated Growth organization was formed and aligned around the customer journey.
The Growth organization, now supported by newly joined experienced leaders, has initiated the introduction of standardized processes into its ways of working. This approach aims to consistently increase the velocity of experiments and the delivery of value to our customers quicker without sacrificing quality.
In this new org, I still play the role of a lead designer across the Jira Software journey while getting the much needed support from the design managers of the Find, Use and Buy teams.
Impacts of this large-scale program so far
The transformation of the customer journey has yielded significant positive results, with increased purchases of Jira Software Cloud by a healthy margin between March 2023 and December 2023 - although we are only getting started. This improvement translated to a 20% lift from a growth rate perspective. The impact is even more evident when examining the specific stages of the journey:
During the Find Stage: There was a steady increase in customer engagement on our web pages and more quality users signing up for the free edition.
During the Use Stage: We saw an encouraging boost in user satisfaction and successful onboarding - although there is still a lot work ahead of us to make Jira Software even more user friendly to a diverse group of user types.
During the Buy Stage: By simplifying the trial upgrade and purchasing flows, we saw more free users trying our Standard edition and ended up paying at the end of their 14-day trial.
*More shareable results & designs can be shared in later conversations.
Looking forward
The ongoing journey to optimize the customer experience demonstrates the power of cross-functional collaboration and design thinking in driving positive business outcomes.
Personally, looking at the newly improved end-to-end experience (although still ongoing), I’m proud to see a substantial improvement and fluid consistency across our visual, content and interaction design! I can’t wait to see what that experience would continue to transform in the next few months with our strong experiment roadmap.