How is it possible to administer Confluence without using a license seat?

Question

From the Confluence Administration (Cloud) course Users & groups. "The product admin role exclusively grants someone administrative access to Confluence. They don't use a license seat and can't access Confluence content. They can only administer the product."

I can administer Jira without being able to access Jira content but I cannot find a way to do what the above statement suggests is possible.

I have a standard instance.

Default groups 'site-admins' and 'confluence-admins-<sitename>' do not have an admin only option, product access is included.

Creating a group with admin access can only be achieved by adding the Product role 'Product admin' but this role includes product access

Adding to my confusion in the course is the following table with the conflicting info panel below. I can't understand how product access can be separated from being able to administer Confluence only.

Brad Hu · Answer

Thank you for your welcome message. "The product admin role exclusively grants someone administrative access to Confluence. They don't use a license seat and can't access Confluence content. They can only administer the product." Atlassian says it can be done. In Jira, I can do this. The group 'jira-admins-' is granted only the product admin role. With this role I can administer Jira but there is no way to access content. In Confluence, the group 'confluence-admins-' has both access and admin roles by design and Atlassian is clear that this cannot be changed, this group is similar to 'site-admins' but there is no way to create another group with only the product admin role.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

To administrate an Atlassian system, you have to be a user of it - your permission to administrate a system is granted to active accounts.  You have to log into it to get to the administration settings.