Marketplace Partner Spotlight: Refined

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When we ask customers which apps they love to use for support and improving customer experience, Refined apps are often on the list. So we decided to catch up with Philip Garrity, Refined Product Marketing Manager, to get the inside scoop on this long time Marketplace Partner for this month's Marketplace Partner Spotlight. 

Atlassian: How did Refined get its start?

PG: Refined was founded in 2009 by Emil Sjödin and Jimmy Lundström, then university students at Lund in southern Sweden. Emil was studying computer science, Jimmy economics. Emil was doing consulting work for a company using Confluence as their intranet and he had the idea—what if anyone could customize the look and feel of Confluence with an app? RefinedTheme was born a few months later.

Two weeks after putting the app on the Atlassian Marketplace, they snagged a 500-user customer from the U.S. The rest is history.

A: What's your role at your company?

PG: I’m the product marketing manager, so I write most of our marketing materials as well as things like product updates and announcements, blog posts, etc. 

A: What's your favorite thing about working there? What’s your favorite team ritual?

PG: Hands down, the people. Everyone is so kind, curious, and intelligent, it blows me away.

I don’t live/work in Sweden anymore (where Refined is headquartered), but when I did, I loved our Friday team breakfast complete with fresh rosemary & sea salt buns from a local bakery in Malmö. I also really enjoyed Fika every now and then (a Swedish word for coffee, pastries and chatting) some afternoons.

We have a cool office to hang out in, you can peek at it here.

How does your team come up with ideas for new apps?

We’re focused on one app – our main site builder we call Refined. So our ideas are focused on improving Refined vs. building new apps. But we come up with new features by thinking about our customers’ problems. What do we want to solve for them? How will we do it? What data do we have to support our decisions? And which ideas match best with our company vision and strategy?

Think back to when you were developing your flagship app - did you see yourself here now? 

From Emil, our CEO and the co-founder I mentioned above: “No way. Sure, we dreamed early on of building a bigger company around our app. But where we are today—we’ve come further than we actually thought we would.” 

We have more than 4,000 customers in 100 countries, and about 35 employees (and growing) in Sweden and Finland.

What do you think has been the secret to your success so far?

Our product-led growth strategy, talented employees and strong company culture that emphasizes ownership, collaboration and humility.

Tell us about your most popular app. Why do customers love it?

Refined is our site-builder that can be used with Confluence, Jira, Jira Service Management or all of the above. (It’s available on cloud and on-prem).

Essentially, you can turn your Atlassian content into a site accessible to anyone, and build it to make that content super accessible to your target user base through design, layout, and navigation choices. Customers usually build intranets, documentation sites, support desks, and knowledge bases, but they can build anything, really, and there’s no limit to the number of sites they can build.

At Refined, we operate more than 10 sites, all for different audiences and purposes. For example, we run a support site, a migration site, and a documentation site using Refined and Confluence/Jira.

Do you have any new apps or projects you want us to know about? 

Just know that we’re continuing to invest heavily in the cloud version of Refined, making sure it’s delivering the best possible site-building experience for admins (including those at big enterprises), and the best experience for their end users. 

We’re also focused on helping folks get more value out of Confluence and Jira by using them together on Refined sites. So for example, on Refined for Confluence Cloud, we have a feature that makes it really easy for users to access JSM support desks directly from documentation pages, and they can file a request without switching off the Confluence page.

[John Funk]

I had the pleasure of meeting you great folks at Team '22. Still trying to find time to try out Refined, but it's on my list!!