How We Gamified Jira, JSM, Confluence & Bitbucket to Drive Adoption
Hi all,
Stepping slightly outside my usual JSM lane for this one — but it's a topic I get asked about often, so I wanted to share it here: gamifying tool adoption.
Credit where it's due up front: this whole initiative started as an idea from my colleague and fellow ITSM architect, @Elena Lurye . She's the one who first pitched turning our onboarding into something people would actually want to finish, and it's turned into one of the more effective adoption efforts we've run.
One of the recurring challenges with any Atlassian rollout isn't the tooling itself — it's getting people to actually explore what's available to them. The Atlassian tools tend to suffer from "I only use the 10% I already know" syndrome. Most users find the search bar, maybe a couple of spaces they're pinned to, and stop there. Same story in Bitbucket — people learn just enough to open a PR and never discover the features that would save them real time. And now we're extending the same approach into Jira and JSM, since the exact same pattern shows up there too — people default to the handful of fields and transitions they already know and never discover the rest.
So instead of another training doc nobody reads, we tried something different: we turned onboarding into a game.
The idea: quests, not documentation
Rather than write "here's how Confluence search works" as a wiki page, we built it as a Confluence Ninja Quest — a self-guided challenge where completing each step actually requires using the feature, not just reading about it. [Adjust as needed: e.g., "Find a page using a CQL search operator," "Locate a page via label filtering," "Use the advanced search modifiers to find a page you've never seen before."] Each completed step earns a badge; finish the full quest and you've organically learned the parts of Confluence search most users never touch.We also used "Itchy", our company mascot.
We did the same thing for Bitbucket with a Scavenger Hunt built around core repository features [adjust as needed: e.g., locating branch permissions, finding a pull request's build status, tracking down a specific commit through history, checking out the Pipelines tab]. Same principle: each "find" is a real feature you now know how to use, not a screenshot you skimmed past.
A Jira quest is next up on our roadmap, using the same format.
Why this worked better than we expected
A few things stood out once we rolled this out:
- People self-selected into learning. Nobody wants to be told to read documentation. Almost everyone wants to finish a quest they've started.
- It surfaced the exact features people don't discover on their own — search operators, filters, and Bitbucket capabilities that normally only get used by power users.
- It gave us a natural excuse to keep engagement going. We paired the quests with monthly Office Hours / AMA sessions, so people who got stuck (or got curious) had a live outlet, and it drove genuinely good attendance.
If you want to try this yourselves
You don't need anything exotic to pull this off — we built ours natively in Confluence:
- Pick a small number of features that are high-value but low-discovery (search operators, not "how to create a page").
- Frame each one as a task with a verifiable outcome, not a read-through.
- Add a lightweight badge/points system — even something simple works. The goal is momentum, not a full LMS.
- Publicize it somewhere people already look (we used [internal comms channel] plus our recurring Office Hours).
Happy to go deeper into the mechanics if there's interest — let me know in the comments what part you'd want expanded (the badge/points setup, specific quest steps, or how we're extending this into Jira next).
Best, Robert
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Robert Nadon
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