Author Details:
- Name: Janice James
- Title: Community Manager
- Company: Atlassian
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
Hi! I’m a community manager on the online (forum) team led by Monique van den Berg. We’re a mighty team of six tackling all the things online for Atlassian!
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
The forum team is the beating heart of Atlassian community programs. We support the company goal of helping more people in our community self serve their own success journey.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
Community is a native concept to Atlassian. Company founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes hosted the first local Atlassian user group meetup in 2006. Now, 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 communities makes them a natural conduit for product-led businesses like Atlassian and a figurative safe harbor for users to freely exchange knowledge.
The challenge we were looking to solve was how to successfully influence community-led growth across a 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 work 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 & ideation loop, and increased product/feature awareness.
What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved.
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 community platform as the centerpiece of a comprehensive plan to drive product adoption and user engagement.
The team innovated by conducting community-led growth planning workshops, bringing together teams from across the Atlassian solutions portfolio. These workshops resulted in tailored community strategies for each team, aligned with their specific KPIs. For example, the Atlassian Intelligence team focused on an end-to-end plan for the launch of Rovo and growing group membership by 125%, while the Confluence team aimed to boost Atlassian team member engagement in the forum and as speakers at their events.
By facilitating collaboration, we overcame the challenge of creating cohesive community strategies that respected each product team's unique needs.
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
As a newly formed team driving internal enablement, we're in the early stages of our initiatives. However, in addition to the metrics already mentioned (product/feature awareness, engagement, and feedback) the team is influencing the following community and learning organization KPIs with our work in enabling community-led growth:
- Online community MAU
- Community and Proprietary events attendance
- Learning courses and certifications completed
From our example above of Atlassian Intelligence, Rovo, and Confluence - The outcomes measured from their tailored strategies at the close of last quarter were successfully launching the Rovo product board and associated gamification challenges with strong Atlassian team member engagement, along with a 53% increase in group membership for Atlassian Intelligence KPI. With Confluence, we successfully influenced their KPIs with a 13% increase in accepted answers + a 62% increase in Atlassian Speakers at their events.
An early win was the creation of a series of gamified learning initiatives within the community ecosystem for Atlassian Intelligence, Loom, and Confluence. This initiative leveraged the Khoros community to facilitate post-live event discussions within the forum. This led to increased engagement (posts, kudos) in those spaces of 6%, 12%, and 74%, respectively.
Another example is we ran a month-long Jira July product love campaign, where users participated in forum activities that deepened their knowledge of Jira while showcaseing how it’s helped set their business teams up for success. This initiative contributed to a ~53% QoQ increase in posts to the Jira collection.
These early wins have been crucial in demonstrating the value of community-led growth strategies, leading to wider adoption across the organization and positioning our community at the center of our product development and user engagement efforts.
We expect to have more quantifiable data in the coming months as our initiatives mature.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
We’re still in the early stages of gathering long-term data, however we've already observed promising progress outcomes that indicate positive trends in addressing our challenges:
- Diversified Community Engagement: By tactically engaging teams, we’re aiming to expand community event offerings, creating more touchpoints for user interaction and knowledge sharing.
- Increase in Atlassian-Hosted Events: We've seen a notable uptick in the number of Atlassian-hosted community events. This increase is expected to positively impact our CSAT and NPS scores as users benefit from more direct interactions with Atlassian experts and peers.
- Enhanced Internal Involvement: Atlassian team member involvement within our community ecosystem has markedly increased. This deeper engagement will empower users to resolve their questions and create on-demand knowledge as more Atlassian team members actively participate in community discussions.
- Structured Engagement Playbooks: We've developed comprehensive playbooks for different internal stakeholder groups on how to engage with the community. These resources are aimed at empowering more Atlassian team members to effectively reach and support community members.
- Broader Organizational Integration: We've observed a deeper permeation of community initiatives throughout the Atlassian organization. As more teams become equipped and utilize community channels in their workflows, we anticipate adoption of community-led growth will have significant mutually beneficial outcomes.
- Enhanced Internal Enablement: By tactically enabling internal teams, we're creating more 'stickiness' for community programs internally overall.
Initial outcomes are laying the groundwork for the team influence on measurable improvements in key areas such as customer lifetime value, support deflection, and overall customer satisfaction.
What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved?
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.
For instance, the badge and group hub features enable community strategists to easily spin up experiments, resulting in increased traffic and engagement in those spaces. Overall, the platform enables us to provide a gamified centralized knowledge exchange, improve awareness of our portfolios capabilities, and provide a fun and rewarding user experience.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
Our partnership with Khoros has been instrumental in addressing the challenges of a community program with complex needs. Working with a platform partner capable of providing the right resources at the right time has ensured Atlassian can implement initiatives that utilize the platform effectively.
We’d also like to note the training and resources made available to users. Khoros Academy and live sessions have empowered our team to maximize platform's potential. This was particularly helpful when we onboarded four community managers at once!
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.
Cheers!