Thought it might be useful to share the perspective of someone who worked at Atlassian during that transition... and the thinking/reasoning/causes behind it.
1. Force/coerce your users to go through a migration process onto a subscription cloud model.
Atlassian started looking at the cloud model in 2006. Back then, we tested evaluations for Confluence in a cloud environment.
While the installation process of Atlassian tools was straightforward for technical users, business users faced challenges in easily trying out Confluence.
Customers consistently demanded software that was easy to set up, integrate, and maintain—all the things Atlassian talks about as Cloud benefits. However, achieving these benefits meant sacrificing some flexibility and customization.
Atlassian considered building both cloud and server applications on a shared foundation but ultimately decided that a native cloud infrastructure was necessary to fully realize the cloud’s advantages. This led to the forking of the codebases.
Today, Atlassian maintains essentially two distinct products catering to different audiences and requirements. The demand for Data Center solutions diminishes annually as cloud offerings grow more powerful.
It’s worth noting that even before the cloud, most companies used a subscription-like model, often packaged as product versions or maintenance contracts, typically at a lower cost compared to the initial purchase price.
2. Over a period of years (incrementally, gotta spread out the misery) strip away & replace features we’ve come to rely on, with the only recourse being a paid add-on or a less effective workaround.
Having lead a number of teams at Atlassian, I can tell you that removing features has never been taken lightly. It only happens when a feature has extremely low usage and is either expensive to maintain, impacts the overall usability, or doesn't align with a shift of focus.
These are complex and difficult decisions to make. It's nearly impossible to not upset some users when making those decisions, but the intention is always to serve the greater good.
Confluence's wiki markdown is a great example of this. I still hear people complaining about Atlassian removing markdown. But it opened up collaboration to a whole new audience that was less technical. And with Atlassian's mission of unleashing the potential of every team, it was definitely the right call.
3. Ignore customer feedback, when necessary to engage, instruct your support teams to frame all communications using the "happy, go-lucky cheerful tone" approach.
This is a tricky one. As Atlassian grew, so grew the number of customers and the amount of feedback we received. It became extremely difficult to stay on top of all the feedback, let alone to provide constant updates on thousands of requests. Atlassian has tried many things to improve that process over time, with various degrees of success.
I also noticed that people internally became more hesitant to comment on public issues or in public forums. Every word they said was used against them. And some comments could be outright abusive, calling for employees to be fired.
4. In the case a ticket is opened & customer must be engaged, each ticket will necessitate the user liquidates a portion of their daily time & effort equal to that of a highschool book report. This is just to reach a mutual understanding of the issue.
This is probably a case by case basis, but it can be complex to debug issues. I'll leave it at that.
5. After the time/effort tax is extracted, link their support ticket to an internal feature request & shuffle both off to a queue, some Dark Eternal Void, to be never seen again.
This comes back to scale. You can't jump on every bug/feature request that's being reported. Otherwise you won't get anything done. You need to find a way to priorotize based on demand, severity, impact...
However, I do think there are ways to handle the communication better. It's a space I'm quite passionate about and that we are looking at with Released.
6. Introduce incremental advertising/pop-ups over a span of years for premium license customers to sustain those profit margins. Premium what?
Ok, I got nothing here. These are clearly getting out of hand. It's a typical symptom of having goals to drive a specific metric at all cost, ignoring the overall user experience.
There definitely should be a better balance. I wish Atlassian explored more subtle ways to make folks aware features in Premium.
7. AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI,AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI,AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI,AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI,AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI
There is a lot of opportunity to massively improve Atlassian products and the core experiences. But there will also be some "throwing shit at the wall to see if it sticks". I'm hopeful it can be done with balance.
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