Atlassian - working at the confluence of customer experience and scale

Collaboration Software Used by Millions

Founded on the back of a credit card in 2002 by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, Atlassian has grown to be one of the world’s largest and best-known tech companies. Their tools are used by millions of customers worldwide to manage software delivery, enabling better collaboration and ways of working across teams.

Flagship products such as Jira and Confluence have become integral to how many organisations work today, underpinning how they communicate, specify and prioritise their work.

From Blueprint to Scale

We started working with Atlassian in 2018, developing cloud-installation blueprints for their data center products. These blueprints were designed to help enterprise customers manage their deployments better and to ensure that their cloud infrastructure was configured correctly, reducing operational costs and support overhead. (Some enterprise customers have over 100k users!)

This initial development work built on our deep knowledge of Azure, AWS and Atlassian's products. It led to some immediate success for Atlassian’s customers - success that translated into more work for our team. What started as an ask for short-term help eventually turned into a 5+ year relationship, during which time, the Instil team worked on nearly every part of the Atlassian product suite.

The goal was to accelerate product development and support existing dev teams with expert engineers who could hit the ground running and quickly ramp into the technical stack. The overall goal was to accelerate delivery of features across multiple products.

Part of the Team

It's fair to say that the Instil became an extension of the Atlassian team - still very much part of Instil but fully integrated into the mission and purpose of our customer.

From a technology standpoint, we worked mostly on their data center products focusing on performance and enhancements that would improve customer feedback, but we also worked on the cloud versions of their products, most notably in helping define clear migration pathways for users moving from private data centers into the cloud.

We were impressed with how well they integrated into the internal team's ways of working. This meant that they acted and behaved as a team of full time employees. Their technical ability shone through and the speed at which they ramped on the product challenges and tech stack, meant that they were effective quickly.