Is Atlassians selectively ignoring criticisms of Whiteboard paywalling post Beta?

[Darius]

Hello! 

Im a fairly disillusioned customer looking for answers. Whiteboards, and our attempt to migrate to them (from MIRO) was crippled by the limiting of paid Standard users to "only 3 active boards at one time", the same limit thats on free accounts. 

My question, which Im posting here because the topic has been ignored in the Whiteboards Group: Is Atlassian's official stance on community interaction involving critical feedback to simply ignore it? 

The highest 'liked' post in the Whiteboard Group (other than pinned posts by Atlassian staff) since February outlines in detail what a big problem this change has been for many organizations. Despite many people tagging Atlassian staff, it has been completely ignored. 

So now that this is out of Beta and we are talking about Confluence account functionality as a whole, Im moving it here. 

The original discussion: Plan Changes - Whiteboards Crippled for Paying Use... (atlassian.com)

Can someone from Atlassian please respond? Can you either acknowledge that these grievances are being discussed and considered or if they are simply in fact being ignored? 

Really looking forward to your response! Please don't stone wall this topic! We love Atlassian products. This critical feedback is coming from well informed and thoughtful places. 

Signed, 

An otherwise enthusiastic evangelist for Atlassian that has lost considerable trust due to the handling of this Beta going live. 

Tagging the original poster and some of the top commentors:
@Matt Richards @Keith Sottung @Mattias Hallqvist @Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_ 

[Em Ditchfield]

Hello @Darius, @Matt Richards, @Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_, and all our other community members,

We truly appreciate you taking the time to share your concerns and we are genuinely sorry for the frustration you've experienced with the Whiteboard plans as we transitioned out of Beta. We understand that our recent silence here may have been disheartening and we will strive to improve our communication in the future within our Community.

We recognise that having some or limited capabilities available in Standard and Free may be jarring for some of our users. To provide insight into the thought process we took to come to this decision, Confluence offers more than just whiteboards like other pure-play whiteboarding tools; it also includes pages, organization in a page tree, a social home, Smart Links, soon databases, and a whole lot more - all at a lower price point for each comparable tier. Our decisions here were based on the broader context of Confluence's product offering, not solely focused on whiteboard capabilities.

As Christina mentioned in an earlier post, we have made every effort to be as open as possible about what is available in our editions. For example, our Jira integration for import and creation is available across all editions - whereas this requires payment in other products. We also provide 3 boards per user rather than per site, which is an increase in comparison to whiteboarding alternatives.

We value open communication and feedback from our Community, even when it involves difficult conversations like this one. Your feedback has been heard, and while we are not planning to change the current board limit, we are committed to exploring other ways to enhance user experience within the existing framework. For example, we’ll soon be shipping comments and more dedicated voting capabilities to all editions.

Thanks again for sharing your feedback openly,

Emily

[Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_]

Thanks for chiming in, @Em Ditchfield

[Matt Richards]

@Em Ditchfield would you expect people to adopt, let alone pay for, Confluence if they could only create three pages? No, they wouldn't. It breaks the fundamental value proposition of the tool. 

Why is that any different when the page is a whiteboard?

[Darius]

Hi @Em Ditchfield ,

Although I appreciate the quick response, I find your framing to be disconnected from your customer base, the core criticisms we have raised, and the collateral effects of treating this in such a casual way. You've either dismissed, failed to recognize, or chosen to not acknowledge the most significant criticisms and their impact. 

In the very best case scenario, your team has failed at honest, transparent, and clear communication. Failed at setting clear expectations. Failed at listening to the customers you're serving. 

Im really sad that we now need to divest ourselves from the use of Whiteboards, and completely scale back and disable the Databases beta (which we were otherwise also excited about). We were happily accepting the MANY limitations and deficiencies with Whiteboards because of the value it was bringing on the Standard plan. 

The standard limit could have been made literally anything more than the free plan. 5? 10? Nope. You made it 3.

The forced limitations could have been moderately delayed for people over this limit. 
Nope, you over-night paywalled work people had created with little to no pro-active warning.  
This had real world consequences on teams who were hosting meetings, and client presentations. 
Does this matter to Atlassian? Clearly not even enough to acknowledge. 

We have already started a Confluence Premium trial to facilitate exfiltrating the work thats been created in Whiteboards. We'll promptly downgrade after that.

Maybe one day we will want, need, and be able to justify the cost of Confluence Premium, but decisions like this are chasing that date farther into the future and knee capping our efforts to drive adoption in our organiztions (and in turn willingly creating greater dependency on Atlassian products). 

You aren't doing us any favors by "offering 3 per user instead of 3 account wide".  

There is an excessively diminished value to using whiteboards over competing solutions. 

Whiteboards is still a Beta product. Its buggy and lacking features. Theres no way to export data or print to PDF. Features as basic as transparency DO NOT function and the open issues for these problems receive little to no engagement from the Atlassian Team. 

Based on your response, we will be keeping our MIRO Consultant plan which is significantly cheaper than upgrading to Premium and offers significantly more value. 

We're disappointed about this! 

Im disappointed, particularly after pouring so much effort into driving adoption of unified Atlassian product use in our organization. I expect the product team to make decisions that help me drive adoption in the organization. Not to alienate them with anti-customer rationalization. That approach is what drove us away from ASANA. 

However well intended it may be, what I take from your message is that Atlassian Corporate sees Standard users as 'sub-par' and is only interested in forcing adoption to Premium, regardless of the varying needs of organizations. 

[Matt Richards]

"Im disappointed, particularly after pouring so much effort into driving adopting of unified Atlassian product use in our organization. I expect the product team to make decisions that help me drive adoption in the organization. Not to alienate them with anti-customer rationalization."

^ This.

I brought Atlassian to our organization. I was successfully working to make it "home base" for pretty much everything. We were growing fast, deprecating tools outside of Atlassian's ecosystem and centralizing around Jira, Jira Service Management and Confluence. We were looking at Jira Work Management, Compass, Atlas and other secondary offerings. It was working. 

Literally overnight all that momentum was gone. We've stopped exploring new ways of using Atlassian tools and for the first time in over 15 years I'm looking for Jira and Confluence alternatives. 

[simon]

"Your feedback has been heard, and while we are not planning to change the current board limit, we are committed to exploring other ways to enhance user experience within the existing framework. For example, we’ll soon be shipping comments and more dedicated voting capabilities to all editions."

So, shipping more features onto boards that everyone in this, and other threads, are telling you are unusable due to this board limit.

Framing the decision around how much other products cost etc. etc. misses the point.

Confluence is an amazing product because it can be the central repository for information for a company. Content is added and curated with no thought as to how much is in there, because there are no limits to pages or word counts, or links or references. It's a wonderfully free way to organise information.

Then Whiteboards came along as a great way to also add diagrams, retros etc. into the structure we create... and then come to a screeching halt because three boards is utterly usuable.

There's nothing useful I can do which stops at 3 boards.

System diagrams? Nope

Team Retros? Nope

Process Flows? Nope

Nothing with any value has a cap of three boards. Every use case we have for these requires being able to use them freely.

Using board count as a tier cap really just means that there is zero use for boards unless you're at the Premium tier.

And the thing that frustrated many of us is that you launched it into beta, had us get invested, start using it, and then you locked it down, meaning the time and energy we'd spent was wasted. And as you have seen, was actively negative due to it souring adoption that was being actively worked on by many.

If you had launched it in beta with the restrictions you were going to run with, we would have known whether it was worth our effort or not.

A case study on how not to launch a product feature.

[Matt Richards]

My original message (linked above) contains details. Please read and upvote both posts! Atlassian will not change their position without an overwhelming response from customers. 

@Jonno Katahanas 

@Christina Ristevski 

@Daniel Simmonds 

[Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_]

Hi @Darius & @Matt Richards 

I've escalated this post to the Atlassian Team on here so it definitely pops up on their list.

Or could you check on this, @Em Ditchfield?

[Matt Richards]

I appreciate your help, Rebekka. Why is it that mentioning the Atlassian Team on these forums does not similarly ensure that they see the messages we write here?

[Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_]

I escalated this to the Atlassian Support Team so this question goes into a general queue - mentioning specific Team members goes into their own notifications. Those can get crowded quickly so it's easy to miss something.

But I cannot speak for the Atlassian Team, so not sure.

[Matt Richards]

Thank you for the context. It's a shame they miss so much.