Atlassian is a fascinating business. They innovate on how they do business almost as much as the products they create. In 2023, Atlassian had paid training offering, generating millions in revenue each year. In 2024, they made it all free and moved learning under community.
I spoke to VP of Community and Learning, Stephanie Grice, who's been leading the Atlassian community since 2016, about why they made the change, how they've incorporated learning into community, and what the impact of it has been. Let's get into it! 💪
Steph:
Let's go back maybe two or three years ago, most Atlassian University courses were four to eight hours. Most of them cost two or $300, which is quite cost prohibitive already for a lot of people in our community. And a relatively small audience of people engaging in that training. Obviously, there's a price tag on it. It's a long commitment, a four to eight hour course is really for somebody who's, we might say, middle of funnel or bottom of funnel, already very engaged and committed. Probably somebody just getting started in JIRA might not have that much of a commitment if it's not a big part of their job. If they don't have a training budget, they probably wouldn't do that at all. They would probably rely on YouTube and other content that's more accessible to them.
So because of that, we had a great training and a big business around it, but a relatively small pool of people engaging in that training. And it was mostly a very specific persona, like very technical admins of our flagship products. And that's who we were engaging, and it was relatively small.
Meanwhile, in the community, especially at Atlassian over the past few years, there's just been so much organic growth in our community. We're at the point now where about 2 million people a month visit our online community.
For example, this kind of watering hole just organically continued to grow in the community and attract more different types of people, non-technical teams, brand new users, not just super advanced admins, and more end users are engaging in the online community. So when we look at the sort of breadth and depth in that space and just the sheer scale of it, really the university cohort paled in comparison. It was much smaller, and it was a very specific and niche group of people engaging at the time.
The two options then were like, we've got this big watering hole of engaged and curious people that are at all stages of our funnel and represent all of the personas and the different teams that we're building products for. We could either try to build a bridge to this university world and see if we can just point people back and forth more and create more of awareness play, or we can move the university house into community and really just bring all of that content and information and embed it in the community versus trying to duct tape the two together.
Our community strategy has always been really grounded in obviously the success of our community and the guiding light is to grow a big enough community and do a good enough job that some people find so much value they go on to become advocates of the brand or top contributors in our community.
And as we did more and more research with some of those top contributors, new members, a constant theme we always heard regardless of where someone was in their journey was they want help building skills, they want training and certification and career help. And that just seemed like such a big value add that we could give the community.
And up until very recently, all of our training was not for free or all of our training was paid. Up until a couple of about a year ago, we started this merge to reduce the price of our training and now our on-demand training is actually 100% free. So that came after we pulled this organization together with community and thought, how do we train more people? How do we make learning more accessible to more people? How do we create meaningful pathways for more success for the folks in our community?
We needed a lot of autonomy in the space of customer education to really reimagine a bigger system of learning that wasn't gated by a price tag or a lot of our larger customers work with partners, which is amazing and really helps them succeed. But a lot of our customers can't afford to work with a partner or aren't big enough to make that make sense for them.
A really big guiding light to bring customer education and community together was we wanted to reimagine customer education as a more community powered play for our company, not only making all of our on-demand training free and more accessible to the community so that more people can get trained and build skills, but we also now have quite a few ways for our top contributors to more formally share their knowledge almost as a community instructor. So we've now created a lot of really interesting paths for folks.
Steph:
So one of the first sort of running the numbers bit of the strategy was just sheer volume and we had this really large engaged audience and we wanted to train more people and how do we navigate them without creating a really gnarly, friction full experience for somebody who is bopping between those two very separate worlds. Knowing that we wanted to grow our trained and skilled audience, knowing that we wanted to help more people learn how to use our products, particularly as they're getting started, bringing all of that closer and embedding it more deeply into the community, lifting the price tag on training so it makes it a lot easier for us to do that. Those were some of the first numbers that we ran in looking at the sheer volume.
We'd go from just to make up some numbers here, training a thousand people a month on JIRA and university to maybe training a hundred thousand people a month in JIRA if we pulled that content into the community where there's already such a large engaged customer base.
Another part that helped with that ROI equation because our university courses, when they were a couple of hundred dollars, they were making revenue, they were making money for the company. So obviously that's a conversation to have when you start giving away something for free is how does that hit our business? And luckily, because it is Atlassian and there is this sort of intrinsic customer centricity, 'don't F the customer' is one of our values and it is definitely something woven into a lot of decision-making. Just pitching, we're gonna train and certify more people. We're gonna help more people get value out of our products here's what the revenue trade-off will be. That actually wasn't a really hard conversation to have. Most of our leadership were like, yes, it's hard to use JIRA. It's hard to learn how to use JIRA, but we know once people get it and they get over that hump of the onboarding sort of learning curve, it's just that we've unleashed the potential for them and their team. They've got a million different things they can now do and so much value they can get out of the product.
So we really zeroed in on onboarding as a problem statement and as an area where we were turning a lot of people because it is a bit of a steep learning curve, steeper than we would like it to be.
And that was where we ran more hard numbers about like, all right, if we could reduce churn in those first couple of weeks by making training more accessible, by introducing people to other learners earlier in their learning journey, that human component that the community adds to the learning space, that got people really excited and narrowing in on the problem around onboarding in those first couple of weeks and how we could ideally make people stickier and picking up skills and knowledge quicker, earlier in their journey.
So not only taking that four to eight hour JIRA course and making it free and just putting in community, but breaking it down to 10 minute courses on JIRA or putting a 10 minute course about JIRA in the same space as where you can ask questions of other people that are already using this product. That kind of helped create a little bit of a learning ecosystem where there's more self-sustaining engagement.
Steph:
One of the first things that felt like low hanging fruit or very easy for us to test and sort of pilot was the idea of our trained and certified champions in our ecosystem that have spent many years in multiple of our products and hold certifications in multiple products. There's this natural, like I've acquired all this knowledge, I wanna turn it around and help other people who are just starting out. More and more of our top contributors in our community were expressing that type of interest.
We have launched what we call community learning, which is live, the format of like instructor led training, but the instructor in the front of the class, so to speak, this is all virtual, but the instructor at the front of the class is actually one of our customers and one of our champions, who's just an advocate of the Atlassian brand. And they've built up a really large network in our community. They built up a lot of skills and they're now leading monthly cohorts of new user sort of training and live training for people, whether it's how to get started in JIRA or how to prepare for your first JIRA certification exam. So we've created a new avenue for some of our top contributors in the community to start to more formally share their knowledge almost as an instructor in the community, leading regular, repeatable, consistent cohorts of new users in training. And that community learning offering has been really great, it's just taken off.
I think as one month that stands out in my brain, in January of 2024, 10,000 people attended one of those virtual trainings led by our customers.
And this really, again, allows for more people to get trained and it creates that really great, yeah, little kind of win or swirl between community and learning where it's our community training each other from the seat of somebody who's had to do this as their job for 10 years that can give really authentic and thoughtful and human advice about our products and how to think about them and use them. And administer them.
We have also created a formal program for members of our community to shape our certifications and even write questions for our certifications so that the Atlassian certifications we can say are like crafted and literally written in part by the people that use these products every day. It's not Atlassian deeming, here's the right way to do it, here's the test to figure out whether or not you know how to do it. We're almost crowdsourcing from the experts in our community. How would you write this question? How would you validate someone's knowledge if you had trained an admin next to you? How would you validate their knowledge at the end of that sort of onboarding phase? We call it our certification SME or subject matter expert program, but that's a new formal way for folks that are already certified in the community to start to shape and influence certifications for other folks as they're coming through that journey.
We now award badges for taking training or engaging with learning, extending our gamification and our perks and rewards to recognize things beyond community, quote unquote. But we know that a little thumbs up or a little positive reinforcement when you're learning something new can go a long way and that confidence can really help somebody keep some fuel in their tank.
So we've extended our gamification to do more lightweight sort of badges and surprises and thanks and rewards to folks as they're earlier on in learning. Whereas a few years ago, it's really until you get certified, you don't get a big kudos or thumbs up that helps boost your morale and your confidence and that's, certifications are harder. Those are quite far in the funnel. So extending gamification beyond just community actions to include learning actions has helped us create those little meaningful mechanisms earlier on for more folks, which I would say is a programmatic play as well.
Steph:
We have a platform provider for our user group program. We use Bevy for our online community. Right now we use Khoros and our learning management system. We're actually building a custom LMS that really is just allows us to have these modularized bits of learning content that get pulled into learning paths, get pulled into the community, get pulled into the product, into JIRA itself, into an onboarding flow. So we're building a custom solution there so that content can be really extensible and not gated inside of an LMS, so to speak.
Those three bits, our events, our online forum and our training, they do actually are all in the backend powered by separate platforms and systems.
What we're actually actively working on launching soon is the front end of that being a single front door. And what we're trying to glue together from a technical perspective is we know we need slightly separate platforms and services on the backend, but we know we want people's experience to be seamless and all these things come together.
We're actually now in the process of even redesigning the sort of backend platforms that power our learning management system and our community systems so that the front end continues to become more of a seamless experience for users. And they've got a single profile across learning and community.
Steph:
I've sat in marketing for most of my career at Atlassian. And when I was overseeing our online forum and our user group program, I sat in marketing. And then about two years ago now, I moved into customer success. And that's when, at the time I was then sitting next to, but not over customer education. So customer education was in customer success as well. We moved customer education under community and then about six months ago, moved back to marketing. So I'm now sitting back in marketing and customer education moved as part of my organization with me.
Just as an anecdote, I've observed that's been actually really interesting and invigorating for the team working on the customer education side to go from a very pre-sales, post-sales kind of customer success oriented world into the part of the company that is positioning and how do we talk about our products? And how do we want other people to understand and take in our products? And what are the core features that are most important and stickiest about our products? And having that sort of lens really infuse, all of our on-demand courses, for example, which are ultimately digital content. That's now really, we've got a lot of our product marketing managers now a lot more activated and thinking a little bit less traditional marketing and more, how do I bring someone all the way through the funnel to value? And they're loving JIRA. So that's been fun.
It's been really interesting to see customer education sit in marketing for the first time in Atlassian and how that's shaping the learning roadmap and the topics that we're building content about.
So there's still learning and he's head of learning under me. Similarly, we have head of community programs, head of loyalty programs and things like that. But there's two functions on my team that actually support both community and learning.
So operations we learned, at first we had them separate. We had learning ops and community ops, but live learning or those community learning classes are a great example of things started to swirl. And it was like, is this a community thing or a learning thing? And we were all like, why are we even asking ourselves? These are just things we're doing for the community. So really there's certain areas of the business like operations and tooling and processes where we're like, what fits the most use cases? What's the smartest way to solve for this problem that actually solves for these other problems as well? So operations is community and learning operations. And we do always try to look for how could we approach solving this thing that is long-term and would allow for us to start to test it in the learning space as well.
The other function that serves both a community and learning side of the coin is marketing. So I have a team under me that is community and learning marketing and everything from positioning and message house for on-demand content or our user group program to launching campaigns that promote that offering at sort of top of funnel. And that team also owns more of that like full life cycle marketing in our world from joining the community or taking your first training or whatever that first step is to you're much more engaged and now sharing and leading. They also do a lot of the journey and kind of funnel engagement with community members.
So operations and marketing under me are both a community and a learning shared function but then learning is still its intact business. And there's a couple of teams around the community space that are still more focused on that kind of traditional the online forum and community managers and moderators for that or the user group program.
Steph:
So there's what we would describe as like leading and lagging indicators of success for the community. And that this has been a journey. Obviously there's a desire from the business to just speak in terms like ROI or speak in terms of revenue or pipeline generated and the monetization of these things. And with something like training or a user group engagement it's a longer tail. There's not really, it's not like a traditional paid marketing thing where you can say, sure, we spent this much money and this many new customers joined because we are very focused on the success of the people in our community and then over their course of their careers, loving JIRA so much that they refer other people to JIRA or they help drive standardization of JIRA. That's a long ROI window to start to try to put some containers around and some structure too.
What's helped us is really breaking it into leading and lagging. Leading indicators of success for us are sheer growth in the community. And again, that really includes taking training and certification as well. So in that broader community and learning space are more people engaging, are more people repeat engaging. So coming back within 90 days and taking another action versus one and done.
We also track what we call champions. So that program for us, it's our lasting community leaders. That is another sort of KPI. Is the community growing and as our group of these advocates and these leaders in this space, is that growing as well? That's the North star across everything that we do.
Then specifically for learning, there's a whole slew of KPIs. Number of enrollees, completion rate, CSAT. For the online community, we track response rate. We track new contributor rate, published success. So each of our verticals, as we would call them, like training, certification, the online community, user groups. Each of those four verticals has its own KPIs and its own directly responsible individual who oversees the success of that vertical. And those KPIs go deep within the success of that particular offering.
The North star is total audience growth, community member or champion. And those are our leading success. We're putting things out there, we're making improvements, we're listening to the community and iterating. Is it working all up? Are more people joining and sticking around and staying engaged? Are more people going on to even lead in the community?
For lagging success, we track, we've actually tried a couple of different things over the years. If you asked me this 10 years ago, we would be talking about support cost deflection. And that's how we originally got the funding to launch our online forum. A couple of years ago, I was talking a lot in trying to measure pipeline influence. So people engage in the online community or they go to a user group event, then they go home. The next couple of months, do they buy a product or do they expand their use of our products? And can we try to say that we influenced that? There's a lot of teams trying to say they influenced everything that changes with a customer's account. So that got a little hard to pin down to, is it the fact that they went to this user group meetup or is it that they downloaded a one pager or that they went to a webinar?
Our most recent attempt at this sort of lagging success or downstream success is actually looking at account, at the account level, a customer, they might have a hundred thousand people at their company using Atlassian products. We wanna see a percent of our user base engaged in our community.
We wanna tell the story that those users who are engaged in our community, they have higher product adoption rates, they have higher product satisfaction rates, lower churn rates, they expand to additional products faster. We see that and we can tell that narrative today. It's a correlation. We can talk about that with a lot of confidence.
And what we're currently very focused on is could we publish even like a quarterly report that shows the health and success of our customers as they get more engaged in community. So as more of our user base starts to engage in that, can we also start to track like the moment of engagement and then from that on, how the health of that account moved? Are they, do they have more certified admins? Do they have more people now going to events and engaging with other Atlassian customers? So really starting to reground back in adoption and satisfaction and expansion as some of those lagging indicators. And like I said, trying to create as much structure around that as possible. So it's not just a loose correlation, but it's something that we can actually pinpoint to a specific action taken at a specific time drove this behavior.
The lagging success and those metrics have just always been, frankly, just tough to pin down and tough to drive to a specific causal relationship.
So most of my reporting and my OKRs are in those leading success and just like my contract to the businesses, I will make, you know, our team will make this one of the best communities in the world and it'll be global and it'll continue to grow. And that's what I report out on with most clarity and confidence.
Steph:
Our learning business has just taken off, obviously making it free really helps with creating a less friction for people to get in that front door. So just sheer enrollment and the volume and the diversity in people that are now taking our on-demand courses, it's probably the biggest change.
I believe it's at this point we're about 40% growth year over year by lifting that price tag and starting to ship much shorter, again, 10, 30 minute versus four, eight hour courses.
So sheer volume and diversity in the types of customers.
A lot of people, we've seen a lot of growth in particular in our getting started and fundamental courses. You know, that more beginner content, obviously, is just where we're seeing a lot of growth. And then we do expect the overlap to continue to grow.
So when we first baselined how many people are, who's engaging in the community, who's engaging with Atlassian University or our learning content, and this was about two years ago, at the time it was less than 1% overlap. We're continuing to grow and add people into the community and we tell almost everyone now, as soon as you get your JIRA seat or license or you get access to a new product, we're like, great, welcome to JIRA and welcome to this community. How can we help you? So a lot of thought has gone into getting, everyone that comes in Atlassian's front door should quickly know and be ushered to like, there's this multi-million person community, it's global, there's, your people are here, there's something for everyone.
So that's helped create the stream of growth into the community and as the community grew, we didn't really see the same growth in university and so that overlap actually just started to shrink where less people were inclined to sit for four to eight hours and pay a couple of hundred dollars to do that type of training. And they're like, for free, I can go ask some admins how they got started and what resources they used. So that's, the overlap in the two was actually quite low and dropping as the community grew and we do now expect that to start to flip.
So there you have it. That's how they combined learning with community at Atlassian. I hope that helps ✌️
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