Path to cloud
Perfecting the migrations from server to cloud
Project overview
It can take 9 months or longer for an Atlassian customer to move from Server to Cloud. Path to cloud provides a carefully curated host of resources for a server customer to plan, assess and migrate to cloud. They can directly go to the link from their My Atlassian page or Atlassian homepage and start planning their migration to cloud or data center.
Role
• Designed up with the Atlassian leadership providing them insights and strategies on the approach
• Designed sideways with cross-functional teams who would be impacted with the business change
• Collaborated with immediate stakeholders and commerce leadership to evolve the experience with the business strategy and address customer pain points related to the migration experience.
Impact
• This section is NDA protected folks
Problem statement
Before announcing the decision to stop selling server products, a lean team of stakeholders were gathered to build and deliver the resources to enable smooth migration from server products to cloud or data center. The primary goal and driving metrics behind this was to lose as few server customers as possible with the decision.
Approach
As design representative from commerce, my role was to ensure that customers are able to get as many pricing resources as possible for both their server to cloud or data center migrations.
This was especially tricky and crucial given that billing of server products happen differently from the billing of cloud products. While cloud products rely on monthly or annual subscription service business model, server products are one time license key purchase with pay as you go upgrades.
A cost-comparison resource or a pricing calculator for multiple subscriptions had never been built before. We started with three key considerations:
Customer cohorts - Who would we be serving? Since the resources had to be shipped with the announcement, we could start with a single customer cohort and expand to serve other customers. The aim was to focus my stakeholders to prioritise.
Entry points - I took the responsibility to make sure our existing subscription management and purchase platforms provided an easy access to cost comparison and migration resources.
Customisation - We saw that customers rethink about the product and apps they want to have in server vs. in cloud. We needed to enable that customisability in the pricing resource as well.
We began with focusing on Enterprise and Small and medium business customers. We encouraged enterprise customers to talk to the sales team as they might be eligible for additional discounts and led small and medium business customers to try out cloud products for free.
We also addressed the needs of our non-billing contact, non-commercial and Partner customer cohorts in our second release. We realised that customers also want to compare server and data center prices, so we built one in our second release.
During this time, I was closely collaborating with our research team stakeholders and data scientists to ensure we have a closed loop feedback on addressing customer needs on the pricing resources.
Right after shipping our first iteration, our migration team stakeholders came up with delivering one year of cloud subscription trial for free - targeted towards the migrating customers. Because of the lean team, I quickly integrated it to our cost comparison resources with a very popular export to spreadsheet feature.
Conclusion
There you have it, throughout multiple executive and stakeholder meetings, we were able to navigate, meet timelines and consistently deliver customer-focused migration resources. All of the resources are currently available in: www.atlassian.com/migration/assess/journey-to-cloud
Impact
The announcement made multiple rounds of the internet, featuring the founders, COO and other executives as Atlassian navigated towards being the cloud-first company. The migration resources were a resounding success by anticipating and addressing the needs of the server customers before the announcement, saving our customers and customer advocates a lot of overload, especially when it comes to pricing and raising quotes.
Learnings, feedback and growth
The project gave me a great opportunity to collaborate, take ownership and place my customer thinking hat into the sessions. I had the unique opportunity to see first-hand on how executives think about the resources from a bird's eye view and how I can bring value to the discussions by providing them overview of one aspect of it and defending design decisions by providing an informed view of our customer needs.