Atlassian’s Story
Explore how Atlassian leveraged community-lead growth initiatives to enhance product feedback and increase product and feature awareness.
Summary
Atlassian’s mission is to help unleash the potential of every team. Community has been a native concept to Atlassian since 2006. As a global company, Atlassian continues to unite users by centering the customer experience around its community and learning programs.
Atlassian's community consists of robust learning, champion, events (ACE), and creator programs. The democratized nature of information in Khoros Communities makes the solution a natural conduit for product-led businesses like Atlassian and a figurative safe harbor for users to freely exchange knowledge.
COMMUNITY SCALE
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53 %
incease in group membership for Atlassian Intelligence KPI (2024)
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33.71 %
increase in visits (2024)
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53 %
QoQ increase in posts to the Jira collection (2024)
BUSINESS OUTCOMES
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13 %
increase in accepted answers (2024)
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62 %
rise in Atlassian speakers at events (2024)
“Our partnership with Khoros has been instrumental in addressing the challenges of a community program with complex needs.”
— Janice James, Community Manager at Atlassian
About Atlassian
Atlassian powers the collaboration that helps teams accomplish what would otherwise be impossible alone. From space missions and motor racing to bugs in code and IT requests, no task is too large or too small with the right team, the right tools, and the right practices.
Rationale for change / Business use case
The recent challenge that Atlassian was looking to solve was how to successfully influence community-led growth across their global organization. To address this, Atlassian formed a team of community strategists to guide internal customers (platform and product teams) on how to effectively leverage community programs in their go-to-market strategies. Strategists worked directly with product and platform teams to integrate community programs into their workflows, resulting in increased engagement from Atlassian team members and users, an enhanced product feedback and ideation loop, and increased product/feature awareness.
Formed in early 2024, the Community Strategist team swiftly addressed the challenge of integrating community strategies across Atlassian's diverse portfolio of teams. The opportunity: Leverage the Khoros Communities platform as the centerpiece of a comprehensive plan to drive product adoption and user engagement.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
“We can directly attribute success to the Khoros platform's ability to be enterprise-ready. While the Atlassian community does have a dedicated engineering team, many of the features and capabilities used in our work are 'out-of-the-box' functionality. Many of our tactical recommendations for community-led growth are achieved using the Khoros out-of-the-box functionality. The platform's enterprise-ready features have allowed us to easily and quickly scale community initiatives for teams across our product suite.”
Janice James, Community Manager at Atlassian
COMMUNITY JOURNEY
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Inception
Inception
In 2017, Atlassian moved its existing online community from a homegrown platform to the Khoros Communities platform. With the buy-in and support of the company’s executive team, Atlassian’s community ecosystem has grown to encompass many facets in addition to its online community, including ACEs (in-person and hybrid events), as well as Learning (training and certification). The team’s common goal through these engagements is to turn users of Atlassian products into champions of Atlassian products. As the Atlassian community has grown, so have the teams responsible for supporting these efforts, which include community designers, community developers, analysts, UX team, Community Support team, and the Brand team.
Technology: Atlassian launched its community on Khoros Communities in 2017. They incorporated Groups, Q&A, and Contests features to encourage customer engagement and drive a best-in-class customer experience. The team also launched the Salesforce CRM integration to extend community reach and impact, and connect their tech stack.
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Growth
Growth
By 2023, the Atlassian online community had experienced impressive growth, boasting success metrics including 19M+ unique visitors, 270K+ posts, 55K+ questions asked, 30K+ group joins, and 390 superusers.
“Throughout our partnership, Khoros has consistently demonstrated its commitment to our success. The holistic support on offer from the team has been vital in addressing challenges unique to our program and helping drive our community initiatives forward.”
- Janice James, Community Manager at Atlassian
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Maturity
Maturity
In 2024, Atlassian shifted gears to focus its efforts on driving product and feature awareness, customer engagement, and customer feedback. The team rolled out a few product-focused strategies to support these goals, including launching the Rovo product board and associated gamification challenges, creating a series of gamified learning initiatives for the Atlassian Intelligence, Loom, and Confluence products, and running a month-long Jira product love campaign in July where users participated in forum activities that deepened their knowledge of Jira. These efforts have led to increased group membership, engagement, and posts, respectively. These wins have been crucial in demonstrating the value of community-led growth strategies, leading to broader adoption across the organization and positioning the Atlassian community at the center of their product development and user engagement efforts.
Technology: Atlassian took advantage of the Badge and Group Hub features to enable community strategists to easily spin up experiments, resulting in increased traffic and engagement in those spaces.
Lessons learned
Listen to your customers
Listen to your customers
Atlassian learned that listening to its users was imperative for the growth and success of its online community. The team instituted a community advisory board, where broad representation from varying areas of its program can come together and have two-way dialogue with Atlassian to raise issues and ask questions, and Atlassian can collect this feedback for future improvements. It has been a valuable way to give users a voice and make them feel like they’re an extension of the Atlassian team.
Organizational buy-in
Organizational buy-in
Executive leadership. From the beginning, the executive leadership team at Atlassian saw the value in the community in how it could foster knowledge sharing and customer engagement. This top-down level of support helped push Atlassian to upgrade its community platform and invest further in these efforts as a part of a larger community strategy.
Product team. The team recently worked with the DevOps group to run a campaign called ‘Plug Into Jira.’ The group within the community had been growing steadily, but after the campaign's launch, they found the growth increased substantially. Through an analysis, the team found that adding a gamification component to a group within the community increases the growth rate from 9% to 116% on average. Sharing this story and the potential benefits of leveraging gamification within groups in the community with their product team helped demonstrate the value of community and encouraged integration of community into their processes and strategies. These efforts have helped get the product team and other teams alike bought into community and community-fueled growth to support their own goals.
Results
Atlassian has observed promising progress outcomes that indicate positive trends in addressing its challenges. Here are some highlights:
Increase in Atlassian-hosted events
Enhanced internal involvement
Broader organizational integration
Enhanced internal enablement
Why Khoros Community software
The Khoros-powered Atlassian community has enabled the company to provide a gamified centralized knowledge exchange, improve awareness of its portfolio's capabilities, and provide a fun and rewarding user experience. The company highly values the Khoros Communities platform for:
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Community engagement and content types
With Khoros Communities, Atlassian is empowered to cultivate two-way dialogue with members. It can use a host of built-in styles to fuel interaction, including blogs, discussion forums, Q&A, ideas, private messages, and more.
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Community gamification
By making use of badges and ranks in the Khoros Communities platform, Atlassian can motivate behavior that fuels member participation and advocacy. It can score 80+ activities, produce leaderboards, and spotlight champions with unique badges, icons, permissions, and more.
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Unmatched expertise
Khoros provides the most modern community architecture with the longest history of enterprise-level scale, security, configurability, and uptime.
Empowering customers through community
By offering product-focused on-demand knowledge and events, Atlassian has enabled customers to efficiently find the resources they're looking while also educating them on Atlassian products and features. Learn how to boost customer experience and satisfaction with a Khoros Community.