Atlassian's move to cloud
2021 was a year of significant transition for Atlassian's server business. On Feb 2, the company stopped selling any newer server licenses and officially went all-in on cloud. I was leading the changes in the shopping cart for this initiative.
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.
THE DISCOVERY
Customer and data-driven insights
We started by partnering with our data science and customer research team to know more about most discoverable and accessible navigation paths in cart and atlassian website. It was all the more important to know about existing customer behaviour, what they might not read and heat maps to inform our decision making.
Budgeting is an important part of the decision for cloud migration
Pricing and Feature comparison are the two key factors behind driving customer's decisions towards migration. Customers would be expecting clarity and transparency from us.
Commerce platforms and atlassian website one of the key platforms to provide visibility about server end of life
The existing customers in the funnel would be primarily be digesting information from commerce platforms, while the new potential server customers would be looking into atlassian.com to discover resources.
Customers would be looking to try Atlassian's cloud products
With the announcements, customers would be potentially interested in cloud products. So we needed to provide a way to ease their journey to try and compare their existing server products with our cloud offerings.
Customers would be expecting discounts as loyal server customers and a way to raise quotes
The existing enterprise server customers have been loyally using Atlassian products since a long time. For this transition, they'd be expecting discounts and a way to raise quotes to accurately estimate how much cloud products are going to cost them.
THE SHOPPING CART REDESIGN
Introducing Serverless Shopping cart and migration pricing resources
Migration resources for cloud and data center pricing comparison
We shipped three pricing comparison resources to allow customers to plan their migrations - basing them on the different customer cohorts that Atlassian serves.
The cost comparison resource started with path to migration to cloud for different products followed by the server subscriptions owned by customers where they can tweak with the subscription cycle, choose the subscriptions they want to move to cloud and see the overall costs.
Customers could navigate immediately to start a one year of free cloud trial. More than 50% of the customers who went through cost comparison immediately navigated and activated the cloud trial.
Others who needed more time for evaluation could export the calculated data in a spreadsheet to analyse and add in their calculated costs. More than 70% of the customers also downloaded the data for their business and procurement purposes.
We also started ideating on a pricing calculator for customers who are just exploring and not logged in - the concept was shipped a year later as cloud cost calculator by the team.
Additional customer cohorts
The cost comparison page needed to cater to all the customer cohorts. Looking at this, I strategised and designed the journeys for the different customer cohorts served by Atlassian.
Additional offers and Server EOL information provided to the customers on top discoverable pages
One part of the process was informing customers in
THE FRAMEWORK
How we got there
My aim was to assess the purchasing, upgrading and renewal journeys for our new and existing customers, in order to understand and explore potential opportunities in the platform.
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 EVOLUTION
Reassessing our resources through research
Due to Project's confidentiality, we released resources for migrators without getting any feedbacks.
We started a thorough validation on how the re-design and migration resources are enabling self-serve migrators and to identify areas for improvement, optimise our future releases and measure change over time
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