Portfolio Presentation
Introduction
In 2014, I joined Atlassian as a Senior Associate Program Manager for the Voice of the Customer (VoC) team. Atlassian, known for its unique "no sales teams" acquisition strategy, aimed to rely on exceptional product experiences to drive growth. My role was to ensure that customer feedback directly influenced product development, operational efficiency, and strategic decisions, ensuring those exceptional experiences were consistently achieved.
Context
Customer Growth Challenges: While Atlassian's products were widely adopted, the company faced challenges in understanding customer friction points during product adoption and use. This was critical to maintaining low Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and driving customer retention.
Operational Efficiency: With SaaS industry gross margins averaging 70.9%, Atlassian needed to optimize operations to maintain its exceptional 83.4% margin, ensuring that customer insights translated into tangible business outcomes.
Strategic Impact: VoC insights were not just for incremental improvements; they played a pivotal role in high-level decisions, including acquisitions like Trello in 2017, which contributed $4 million to annual revenue that fiscal year.
Key Projects and Contributions
Enhancing NPS and Customer Feedback Channels
Challenge: Atlassian's Net Promoter Score (NPS) was stagnant at 9, reflecting underlying issues with customer experience that needed to be addressed to support growth.
Solution: I spearheaded comprehensive customer research initiatives, introducing new feedback mechanisms like the enhanced NPS surveys for products such as Jira. These surveys included open-ended questions to capture qualitative data, providing deeper insights into customer sentiment.
Impact:
NPS improved from 9 to 37.
A 70% increase in qualitative responses, with the average word count rising from 75 to 350 words.
These insights influenced product roadmaps and directly contributed to improvements in customer acquisition, retention, and engagement.
Identifying Diverse User Experiences
Challenge: Different user groups—designers, administrators, and developers—experienced Atlassian products in unique ways, leading to inconsistent satisfaction levels.
Solution: I conducted detailed segmentation analysis to understand the specific needs and pain points of each user group. This data was used to tailor product features and support resources.
Impact:
Improved user-specific product features, enhancing learnability and usability.
Reduced friction during the adoption phase, supporting Atlassian's "no sales teams" strategy and maintaining low CAC, which ranged from 12% to 21% of revenue, significantly below the industry median of 50-100%.
Driving Operational Efficiency Through Insights
Challenge: Atlassian needed to balance quantitative metrics with actionable insights to improve operational efficiency without compromising customer satisfaction.
Solution: I developed a framework that integrated metrics with qualitative insights, ensuring that product teams could make data-driven decisions without losing sight of the customer experience.
Impact:
Helped maintain gross margins around 83.4%, surpassing the SaaS median of 70.9%.
Enhanced product development processes, by delivering insights packed into “ownership buckets” reliability, usability, and functionality. This work helped associate feedback and customer experience with the teams who own the functional responsibility.
Strategic Influence and Acquisition Support
Challenge: The acquisition of a large, diverse group of customers from different industries presented a unique challenge. While Jira was originally designed for developers, it fell short of meeting the needs of other segments. The product's complexity, feature richness, and administrative difficulty created barriers for broader adoption across varying user groups.
Solution: I provided VoC insights which informed Atlassian’s decision to purchase Trello in 2017, a move that aligned with customer demands for better project management tools.
Impact:
Trello contributed $4 million to annual revenue in its first year post-acquisition.
By 2019, Atlassian's revenue had grown to $1.21 billion, up from $620 million in 2017.
Measuring the Customer Experience
Challenge: The challenge was that our current approach of random in-app surveys was not journey-specific. This made it incredibly difficult to associate tasks with experience measurement and impossible to report on progress or impact to the overall metric.
Solution: I developed a journey-based model for capturing feedback on specific tasks, with the intention of building a digital health metric. This metric correlated directly with journey experiences on a 1:1 basis, allowing the business to pinpoint which tasks within specific journeys were impacting the overall digital experience.
Impact:
This was a strategic concept and was not complete when I left the company. While specific outcomes were not realized during my tenure, the modeling performed prior to my recommendation laid the groundwork for future advancements in customer experience measurement.
Conclusion
During my tenure at Atlassian, I led initiatives that significantly improved customer experience, operational efficiency, and strategic decision-making. My work directly contributed to:
Increasing NPS from 9 to 37.
Supporting a low CAC strategy, maintaining costs at 12-21% of revenue.
Helping maintain gross margins at 83.4%, well above the industry median.
Informing the acquisition of Trello, contributing to substantial revenue growth.
These efforts not only enhanced Atlassian's product offerings but also reinforced the company's reputation for delivering exceptional customer value, supporting its growth into a billion-dollar enterprise.