
Atlassian's User Onboarding Magic - walterbell
http://appcues.com/blog/atlassian-5-billion-dollar-user-onboarding-magic/
======
daveoflynn
This article misses the point. Atlassian's success is not because of their
user onboarding. The onboarding process has been a serious weak point of JIRA
and Confluence for as long as I can remember (and I worked at Atlassian from
2007-2011). Heaps of new-JIRA-users are completely baffled, and a significant
percentage of them turn away from the product suite going "what kind of idiot
would ever use that?!"

Thing is, once you figure out how to make JIRA and Confluence work for you and
your organisation, you probably won't want to use anything else ever again.
They're really powerful, really good products, with a pretty steep learning
curve.

Atlassian's success is because existing, confident, users of JIRA and
Confluence do two things:

1- They tell their friends, colleagues, and random people in the street to use
JIRA and Confluence.

2- When these users change jobs, they bring JIRA and Confluence with them.

Put simply: it's word of mouth that has allowed Atlassian to grow without a
traditional sales force.

~~~
NickNameNick
I must be in the 'baffled' group, my employer moved to JIRA, and it's been a
nightmare ever since.

In particular, because time reporting and billing decisions are made at the
project level, and there is only a single list of projects, with no inter-
project relationships, as opposed to other systems (redmine, etc) which
feature hierarchical trees of projects, basically every interaction with the
system is harder than it needs to be.

Also, 'smart commits' are hideously clunky, when it works at all, which
exacerbates the issues above.

I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anybody, and in fact have strongly
advocated against it.

~~~
manyxcxi
JIRA and Confluence are fantastic at doing their core competency but there are
a lot of fringe features that just seem bolted on because some big time
customer or PHB decided to bolt on things. I found the time keeping to be one
of these things, as well as smart commits- but I think the smart commits
problem is just a matter of iterating the feature and making it 'smarter'. I
think it will eventually be enormously useful.

My experience has been that if you have competent implementors and
administrators of JIRA and Confluence together, and use them primarily to run
projects they are very nice and they interplay very well from requirements and
documentation in Confluence to tasks and WIP tracking I'm JIRA. But if you
implement a crazy JIRA workflow of your own that isn't completely smooth or
organize your projects and documentation in a way that JIRA/Confluence don't
really get- you're going to have a jumble of buttons and hoops to jump through
and your users will hate it.

------
spdustin
Their description of Jira ("like Asana") and Confluence ("like SharePoint")
are far off the mark.

Confluence does not equate to SharePoint except possibly in the limited case
of a SharePoint Enterprise Wiki site. SharePoint is more like a web-based
RDBMS with both list and file-metadata schemas, a web-based RAD environment to
assemble schemas and views (where pages are separate citizens from other data
types), centrally managed metadata, and .NET support for enhancement.

Asana is task management with folder and hierarchical organization, Jira is
practically a RDBMS with a web-based RAD environment, its own de-facto
scripting and query languages, and... Wait a minute, it's actually closer to
SharePoint than Confluence.

Source: I've run a SharePoint training and consulting company for over a
decade, and actually use Jira, Confluence and Asana in our own internal
systems (because we'd be remiss to naively assume SharePoint is ideal for any
of the things we use Jira, Confluence or Asana for, and we're not apologists
for Microsoft but rather evangelists for business collaboration). I know very
well how both proverbial halves live (the MS crowd and the non-MS crowd) and
they're not as different as they'd like you to believe.

~~~
cturner
Confluence gets sold directly against Sharepoint. The communications
department says, "we need to create a corporate strategy for communicating.
Dealing with culture is hard, so instead we're going to go and throw money at
mechanism." The contenders are sharepoint and confluence. This sales systems
is what ruined confluence - they used to have a delightful markup syntax that
was a joy to work with, but in order to get checkbox competition against
sharepoint they created an awful broken pretend-WYSISYG.

Asana and Jira joust for dominance in the all-important "issue-based team work
management systems" segment. You can hire agile consultants to tell the people
how to do their jobs using it. (actually I think Jira is awesome, but I hate
that culture)

It speaks well of you that you find this senseless despite your experience.

~~~
underwater
I'm not the biggest fan of markdowns for complex documents.

It's fine for little things like adding bold text or inline code blocks, it as
soon as you start getting into anything complex it requires help text and
constantly checking of the preview window.

Good WYSIWYG editors are much more pleasant to use. Quip, Medium and Facebook
notes all do a good job of constraining formatting and being predictable.

------
ABS
The "without a sales team" meme is utter nonsense. I still don't quite
understand how all the press can ignore the fact that Atlassian has a huge
network of partners (in the hundreds), in almost every country of the world,
that started many years ago and has been growing every single year.

All these partners/experts are resellers who make a margin on licenses and
have sales targets if they want to move up the ladder (better margin, better
payment terms).

Source: I worked for one from 2009 to 2011 and the network has grown massively
since then.

~~~
camkego
My thoughts exactly, they claim to have "over 250 experts worldwide". It seems
to me this partner network might be a very large part of their success.

[http://www.atlassian.com/resources/experts/](http://www.atlassian.com/resources/experts/)

------
thedufer
> the median SaaS company spends between 50-100% of their annual revenue of
> sales and marketing

The fact that we're considering companies that spend 100% of revenue on sales
and marketing makes it pretty clear why Atlassian's costs are so low - the
comparison is nonsense. No company except a VC funded startup can spend 100%
of revenue on any one (or two) things, because then there's no money left. And
calculating anything as a percentage of revenue makes no sense when you're
spending many multiples of revenue because you're running on a VC runway,
rather than like a normal company. This would _maybe_ make sense if we were
looking at percentage of total costs rather than of revenue.

Maybe their sales/marketing costs really are low, but show that by comparing
them to something that makes a little bit of sense. 20% does not sound
unreasonable at all to me.

~~~
TheLogothete
20% is actually on the higher limit in a lot (pretty much all) "normal"
companies. Spending 50% on marketing is unsustainable.

------
nzealand
Atlassian's low sales costs might simply be a function of who they are selling
to.

E.g. Jira & Salesforce both have the same approximate ease of use, and the
same approximate level of configurability.

Sales implementations are typically top down. So you sell the salesforce
solution to the sales executives. This requires a sales team. And because you
are selling into sales management, you need to a good sales team. I have sat
on these sales calls, and at times it almost felt like a game of "sell me this
pen."

In my limited experience, Jira implementations are the complete opposite. Even
in big companies, they are bottom up. The target audience does not want a
demo, and may not even want to talk to a sales person, they simply want to get
their hands on the product.

Does anyone have any insight into sales costs of other saas development tools?

------
ninkendo
The contrast in this article is ridiculously low. So low I assumed it was
trying to "dim" the content so I could focus on some modal dialog that didn't
load.

~~~
imron
I still don't get how people think that light grey text on a white background
is a good idea ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
itomato
"Awkwardly long loading screens".

What the author fails to mention is that these are on-demand instances, and
what's seen is the 'environment provisioning' delay, not some sort of 'loading
screen'.

I'm getting the feeling this article is written from the viewpoint of a long-
suffering Windows/Microsoft ecosystem user.

~~~
archinal
This was a funny one to read. I worked at Atlassian for around a year,
focussing mainly on this onboarding process.

When I started, the provisioning delay was about 7 minutes and the loading
screen was actually first just a 404 error and then just a static page saying
something like "please wait while this gets set up" (no progress bar and no
redirect on completion).

It's funny knowing that has been one of the biggest onboarding advancements
and it's still being seen as a flaw.

------
svckr
I for one prefer well executed email confirmations above overzealous
validation, making me type my email twice, etc. As long as I don't have to
wait for the mail to arrive, it's fine with me.

Regarding their sales strategy, I'm surprised the article didn't mention
product-integration. There's a great deal of integration going on between
their products and that – if I had to guess – translates to a market of
existing customers that are vastly more likely to buy (/rent) another of their
products. Anecdotal evidence: after some people at our company successfully
politicked for Jira, now they've got their Crucible license and are already
evaluating Confluence and HipChat. Well played, Atlassian.

Also: personally, I don't agree with the article that Jira is simple, but our
managers seem to love it.

Edit: typos/grammar

------
baldfat
Free Unlimited Private Repos was what got me onboard to start using their
services. I then went and also told people that it was my preferred platform
and they eventually bought an account.

Github still is great for public repos but Atlassian is just great for my use.

------
sharp11
tl;dr: there is no onboarding magic. It's "product simplicity".

 _So if Atlassian’s onboarding experience leaves a lot to be desired, how is
it that they have scaled to $320M in recurring revenue with no sales team? How
is the company only spending 12-21% of revenue on sales and marketing while
other SaaS businesses are spending 50-100%?_

 _Product simplicity._

~~~
SEMW
> Product simplicity.

Of the various issue trackers I've used, JIRA is, by a fair margin, the least
suited to that tagline

------
jroseattle
We're prepping to dump JIRA and Confluence _because_ of the user experience.
It's just frankly poor and the flows are overly complex. Way too much work for
what we want out of that tool.

