Atlassian's one invoice
Atlassian had started with
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. The information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Atlassian.
My role
I led the design of Shopping cart for this initiative across all three server, data center and cloud platforms between Aug 2020 and May 2021.
My role was to design up with the Atlassian leadership providing them insights and strategies on how we can particularly surface relevant information and get buy ins to build resources that customers would potentially find useful.
I had to design sideways collaborating with multiple platform and product teams whose flows would also be impacted with this business change and would be stakeholders building in their own teams.
I closely collaborated with a researcher, two content designers, three product managers and commerce leadership to evolve the cart experience with the business strategy and address customer pain points related to the purchase and migration experience.
The cart experiences were made available to customers globally on Nov 2020 followed by subsequent releases.
THE CHALLENGE
Saying farewell to server and accelerating cloud migrations
Atlassian has always been transparent about it's move to cloud since 2016 when they re-did the whole code base to make it cloud friendly and kept evolving to make it ready for our enterprise customer segment. The newer customers were choosing cloud as their first option, but the existing and the enterprise customers needed a push. COVID also posed a new challenge for our customers to move remote fast, thus initiating asks from the team to move to cloud - that means Atlassian needed to shift their focus on cloud.
To evolve with customers, Atlassian leadership decided
The Shopping cart now reflects this vision of Atlassian, offering a limited selection of data center and cloud products, user support increasing from 3000 users to 40,000+ users in one subscription, with exclusive offers for Server and Data center customers to move to cloud and Pricing resources to ease their cloud migrations decisions. With these changes we hoped to create deeper relationships with Atlassian customers.
THE APPROACH
Hypothesise and validate
The whole project had to be kept under wraps before making the announcement. It was substantial to the business that customers or our reselling partners perceive business as usual before we are prepared for it.
Our approach was to hypothesise based on existing customer and data insights and build the resources that customers may potentially need when hearing about end of server licenses.
Additionally, the deadlines were already set. We were working backwards from the date of announcement to development estimations and design strategies on what potential resources we could build. It required ruthless prioritisation.
Continuous discovery
We built our plan into multiple releases. I paired up with my PM stakeholders to strategise the potential resources customers might find useful when they learn about server end of life. The next step was to get the buy-ins from the leadership and ruthlessly prioritise what could be built before the announcement, after the server end of life and onwards.
“The combination of a fixed launch date and aggressive scope created an intense environment with many coordination and time challenges.”
Each feature phase of the project was serialised, starting with the design and development for the Migration resources. Once each feature was designed and approved, the engineering team began the implementation.
I followed by working with product and business leadership to translate the next strategy. Concurrently, I would design the next feature in the pipeline, whilst also working with my own platform engineering teams to execute the current feature through to completion.
DETAILED DESIGN
Communicating design
Atlassian upholds infamously high standards for the work it produces both externally for customers and internally for team members to consume.
This has created a culture which seeks to earn trust through accountability, diving deep into the details and inviting others to scrutinise work. Heavy documentation is the artifact of such a culture.
The sheer size of this project and structured waterfall approach meant that I needed to have everything figured out before teams would commit to moving forward with the work. Many teams involved in the project needed to see it in a tangible document. This risk averse mindset meant I created a lot of reference documentation that was widely distributed and a high overhead to maintain.
“Prototyping was the most effective way to gain meaningful feedback”
For each feature phase, I went through cycles of requirements, consensus, approvals, detailed specs and handoffs.
My process involved sketching and white-boarding concepts and flows with my PM partner and then translating these directly into hi-fidelity design comps. Since I was working with many existing design patterns, it was relatively easy to move straight into hi-fidelity designs.
My next step involved slicing the comps and piecing them together with Figma into a prototype. In the early stages I focused only on representing the highest risk areas of the design. Later phases allowed me to focus on micro-interactions.
Prototyping was the most effective way to gain meaningful feedback from the team, consensus from stakeholders and approval from senior leadership. I was able to easily distribute these as videos and recycle them for Usability Testing.
THE IMPACT
The Most Radical Update Since 2016
Hot off the press
46% successful conversions to cloud through cost comparison resources
85% clicks in shopping cart for discounts and offers
Accurate numbers not shown due to non-disclosure confidentiality
Designed and curated by Agrata Patel @ 2023