A journey through the ages: Atlassian content experience
Intro
I was the Head of Content and Service Design at Atlassian for many wonderful years. As I now retire, I look back with amazement and pride of what we’ve accomplished, and with excitement about where the crafts and work are going next.
I’ll tell our content story in the form of the major time periods of human history: the Stone Age; the Iron Age; the Industrial Age; and the Jetson Age. Poetic license was taken on all.
The Stone Age (2006–2015)
A time where civilizations invented written communications and tools (Encyclopedia Britannica)
The Stone Age — in human history — was a time of building foundations.
In Atlassian’s own long-ago past, we hired our first full-time technical writer in 2006 — employee number 64. In the coming year, we grew to a four-person technical writing team covering six products — Jira, Confluence, Bamboo, FishEye, Crucible, and Clover. Living our company value of ‘Open company, no bullshit,’ we opened our documentation for all Atlassians to update, and extended this power to our readers to edit, use, and reuse freely. This was quite an unusual and innovative decision by a for-profit company at the time.
Just like the Stone Age was the foundation for civilization, the embodiment of our ‘Open company, no bullshit’ value in our approach to content became our own civilization’s cornerstone for scaling to the future. While we don’t allow external document contributions anymore, the culture of broader Atlassians contributing to documentation is still prevalent internally today, and our thriving Atlassian community enables the whole world to share learnings, insights, and help for each other.
The Stone Age in human evolution was characterized by the creation of stone-based tools. During our Atlassian Stone Age, our writers spent a lot of effort wrestling with tools. Publishing was a manual and time-consuming process, where we had to manually copy content to publish. We worked with the Confluence team, and over time they improved and added features for documentation needs, a win for us and our customers. When a third-party company, k15t, approached us with an idea for a publishing solution for Confluence (Scroll versions), we dedicated time from our team to collaborate. This investment enabled us to adapt our documentation and stay on top of our growing product lines and software releases.
The Stone Age, and the unique foundational role Atlassian played in web-based technical documentation, has been immortalized in lots of blogs, books, and awards. Among other mentions, our efforts were recognized in the book Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation by Anne Gentle, and Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate: A Wiki as Platform Extraordinaire for Technical Communication by Sarah Maddox.
The Iron Age (2015–2018)
An era of developing durable materials that unleashed large-scale movements of populations (Encyclopedia Britannica)
By 2015, our technical writing team had gathered a strong set of writers, organized as part of the QA organization. Combining our technical writing mindset with a QA lens, we could proactively identify and prevent support issues before release. By being co-located with our developers, the team could raise warnings and help resolve technical issues, and be ready with thorough documentation released on time with every update. These processes and habits soon became durable and established — the Iron Age was upon us, and we were ready to use this ability to extend where we could operate.
In 2015, the team moved with all our tools at hand into our design organization. This allowed us to not only prevent technical bugs, but also become more impactful in preventing design flaws that led to more complex software and confusing interactions. Over these years, our craft evolved our name — from “technical writing” to “information experience” to “content design,” acknowledging the broader role and scope of great content-driven experience in the modern product development process. This movement also exposed us to the skills and support from designers, enabling us to help each other in providing more elegant experiences — not only in product interfaces with better UI copy, but in documentation experiences as well. Our documentation was updated to include new navigation, information architecture, screenshots, flowcharts, and landing experiences.
Our own craft was not the only one growing and moving. Atlassian itself was expanding our offerings across the board. During this Iron Age (2015–2018), Atlassian broadened the Jira platform and rolled out separate product lines across Jira Software, Jira Core, and Jira Service Desk. Our continued investment in documentation tooling enabled us to do a massive restructuring of content and other support channels to align with our company’s expanded offerings. A new age — the Renaissance* — was born, and we accelerated through this and into the Industrial Age.
Coincidentally, our internal phrase for the separation of these product lines was indeed “Jira Renaissance.”
The Industrial Age (2018–2020+)
An age of mass-scale, replacement of hand tools with power-driven machines, and large industry (Encyclopedia Britannica)
As we delivered on an ever-growing product line, content designers became in high demand. Every team was offering us cash for contractors, and often headcount. Our CTO came out with a company-wide mandate that every web service that serves production traffic and has a REST API needs to be documented internally with API documentation, tutorials, examples, and guide, and even more teams started to talk with us about how to enable this vision with their teams.
We suddenly had individuals across the company walking up to us with cash in hand and pleading for us to take it and give help. Oftentimes, these teams just wanted words and didn’t yet understand the depths behind the surface in Content Design. But they knew they wanted it (and us).
We struggled to have enough support to attract, onboard, and mature our bigger team. Our guidelines and best practices, often in the spirit of progress over perfection, were scattered over dozens of individual pages and Confluence spaces. Our expertise on our own tooling was breaking, with only a few experts who knew how we used Confluence with a large variety of marketplace apps and extensions. Our desire to focus on journeys not moments was well-intentioned, but we didn’t yet have enough headspace to look across the journeys, to walk through them, and ensure that the promises from marketing were being fulfilled in practice with strong content-driven experience.
The light is now starting to come out from behind the clouds.
We are unifying our content guidelines, and establishing governance and content councils across marketing, product, and support to unify our voice, tone, and messages. We have reenergized our training for internal Atlassians across all teams and disciplines, helping all of us grow our content eyes and champion the customer experience for both product and developer content. We have released first versions of contextual in-product help — and customers are engaging in the content AND applying what they’re learning to how they use our products. We are investing heavily in our broader toolset — a full Content Platform, bringing together different services and capabilities in the interest of helping our users find the right information, at the right time, relevant to their products and unique needs.
We are now starting to scale — producing great content experience, en masse, with great quality.
Jetson Age: Looking to the future (2021+)
Since we started Atlassian, our content designers have grown from one individual in 2006 to over 80 today, spanning across the world in Sydney, Mountain View, San Francisco, Austin, Gdansk, Bangalore, and remote home offices. We’ve broadened from long-form technical writing to adding UX writing, content strategy, developer documentation, and guidelines that scale.
As we look to the future, we are continually thinking about how to take advantage of the new capabilities enabled by our tooling, guidelines, and data.
- How might we stay true to our company value of “Don’t #@!% the customer” in how we help customers get the most value out of our products, practices, and services?
- Can we use data to deliver more effective experiences, and help unleash the potential of teams in a world we want to live and work in?
- How do we hone our muscle of looking at and improving end-to-end journeys constantly, but also opening our eyes to look beyond these journeys towards new horizons we have not yet even begun to glimpse?
The future is here — we just have to dream it. And take action to build it.
Introducing Experience Design (XD)
My retirement has provoked the forward-thinking move of integrating content design specialists into our newly-branded Experience Design (XD) organization. This move builds on the huge leaps we’ve made in maturing our content craft, impact, and recognition across Atlassian at all levels.
Under XD, we are integrating all our design specializations together on shared problem spaces and products. We believe this will enable us to tackle our work with a more holistic customer-centric approach, diverse thinking, and accountability for our end-to-end customer journeys.
What comes next?
Our craft leaders are now taking on broader remits, spanning and weaving our diverse design crafts into seamless experiences. They are bringing their content design expertise into all levels and conversations across the organization.
Our terminology and content frameworks, tooling, analytics, and processes are now fully robust, in active use across the company, and are ready to go out and conquer the world.
Our craftspeople are confident, respected, and have strong partnerships in their respective product and platform teams. The change is shaking everyone out of the status quo, and generating new insights, ideas, and conversations everywhere.
I can’t wait to see the next Age of exploration for Atlassian customers!
