Marketplace Partner Spotlight: Appfire
For this month's partner spotlight, we're featuring Appfire, a Platinum Marketplace Partner! We caught up with Paul Lechner, Vice President of Product Management for Marketplace Apps, about how Appfire comes up with ideas for apps, their secret to success, and more.
The Appfire Product Team in Zurich, June 2022
Atlassian: What's your role at Appfire?
Paul: As Vice President of Product Management for Marketplace Apps, I lead a talented team dedicated to delivering innovative solutions to our customers’ most pressing challenges. We enhance and expand the core functionality of the Atlassian ecosystem to create products that effectively address customers' needs. We love making work flow for the community we serve!
Atlassian: How does your team come up with ideas for new apps?
Paul: We’re relentlessly focused on improving the customer experience. We gather insights through a blend of primary market research methods including customer interviews, support ticket analysis, Atlassian community posts, event feedback, and partner channel engagement. This way, we keep the needs and desires of customers in mind at every stage of new app development.
Atlassian: What do you think has been the secret to your success so far?
Paul: Our ultimate goal is to tackle challenging issues in work management and collaboration, so teams can achieve their full potential. The key to our success is unwavering focus combined with a commitment to continuous innovation. We want to enhance the customer experience by constantly improving the way work is planned and delivered, empowering teams to do their best work.
Atlassian: Tell us about your most popular app. What problem were you trying to solve for customers when you created it?
Paul: With our extensive portfolio of apps, it's hard to highlight just one (and I’m not allowed to have a favorite). But, a standout example is JSU Automation Suite for Jira Workflows from the Workflow category. JSU aligns perfectly with our mission of empowering customers to plan and deliver their best work, because it facilitates the automation of work processes, saving teams valuable time. JSU makes it simple to automate a wide range of workflows, freeing up hours previously spent on administrative tasks.
JSU offers a visual, intuitive approach to configuring workflow rules
Another one of my favorite Appfire apps is Configuration Manager for Jira (CMJ). CMJ was the first app from Botron (now part of Appfire). After Atlassian announced its marketplace, Botron did some research on users’ problems and needs by reading through Atlassian Answers (which has since become the Atlassian Community) and going through the publicly visible issues open for Jira and Confluence.
We found some notable issues open for Jira along with many threads in Answers that requested functionality that would allow users to move whole projects with all their dependencies.
There were a few similar issues with a lot of votes and watchers, and a large number of comments, too. So ease of configuration seemed like a good problem to solve with our first product, which was taking away the pain of change management and data migration in Jira, by making it as simple as clicking a button.
We had meetings with PMs from Atlassian to validate the idea, and they told us that migrations, promoting updates from test to production environments, and everything to do with change management presented a huge challenge that they’d struggled to overcome. So we started building this idea into what turned into CMJ.
Move a Jira project to another system easily with CMJ
Atlassian: What’s next for you?
Paul: Within my team, we're always pushing the boundaries of what's possible, exploring new frontiers. Right now, I’m particularly excited about two initiatives: One is a project to seamlessly integrate apps within our portfolio around common use cases, providing even more comprehensive solutions for teams. The other is the Atlassian Team ’23 event, where we'll have the chance to demonstrate our most cutting-edge innovations and connect with valued customers and partners.
To learn more about Appfire, check out their Atlassian Marketplace listing – and don’t forget to comment and let us know what your favorite app of theirs is!
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