6 Apps, 23 Support Tickets, and What I've Learned About Building Software

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It's only halfway through 2026, and across six apps in the Atlassian Marketplace, we've had just 23 support tickets.

I was at WES2026 (Work Evolution Summit) in Bucharest speaking with another Marketplace Partner when I mentioned the low number. The immediate question was: "How do you do it?"

The answer is surprisingly simple: Build good software and resolve issues quickly.

That may sound vague, but after years of building apps in the Atlassian ecosystem, I've found that most support tickets are not random events. They are often symptoms of decisions made much earlier in the design and development process.

When I first started building for the Atlassian Marketplace, it was a hobby. Over time it became a business. But beyond the commercial aspect, I've always enjoyed solving technical problems.

What has shaped me most isn't writing code. It's listening. Every support ticket, customer conversation, feature request, and escalation teaches you something. More importantly, it teaches you how not to build software.

Over time, we've developed a simple rule before writing a single line of code:

• What problem are we trying to solve?
• How does this solution solve it?
• Is it easy to use?
• Is it well documented?
• Does it work as designed?

Only after answering those questions do we start building, because writing code is rarely the difficult part.

The difficult part is building something that remains reliable long after it has been deployed. When we design our applications, we assume they will be running continuously. If something fails, it should recover gracefully. If a process stops, it should restart. If a user performs an action, the outcome should be predictable.

That mindset has helped us build applications that are functional, reliable, and straightforward to use.

One of the recurring themes at WES2026 was the future of work. Unsurprisingly, AI was at the center of many conversations. But one observation stood out to me.

Organizations don't struggle because they lack tools. They struggle because the tools they have are often too complex, poorly understood, or difficult to adopt.

Whether it's AI, automation, or user management, the principle remains the same: A tool only creates value when people can use it effectively.

The best software isn't necessarily the most advanced software. It's the software that helps people achieve an outcome with the least amount of friction.

As Marketplace vendors, we're constantly reimagining how people work. But the goal shouldn't be complexity. The goal should be clarity.

Because when software is easy to understand, easy to adopt, and reliable in operation, support tickets naturally decrease. And perhaps that's the real lesson behind those 23 tickets.

There's this quote I always say and mostly I post some of them on LinkedIn "Good software removes complexity. If your software is complicated, something went wrong". And it's important to know that good software doesn't eliminate problems, it prevents many of them from ever happening.