Industry
Software
Client
Atlassian
Year
2020
In 2019, Atlassian introduced a Premium pricing tier for Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, and Confluence to better support larger teams with complex needs. To launch successfully, six cross-functional teams collaborated over six months to prepare the product, pricing, and go-to-market experience.
As a UX designer on the Commerce team, I led the design of a new billing flow that supported plan upgrades and downgrades. I worked closely with a dedicated scrum team and collaborated with designers across the broader user journey.
We needed to integrate Premium plans into our billing system, enabling admins to manage subscriptions with clarity and confidence. The experience had to support upgrades, downgrades, renewals, cancellations, and more—while aligning with upstream marketing and downstream support needs.
We conducted competitive research across leading B2B tools (Slack, Dropbox, G Suite, Office 365) and gathered internal insights from Bitbucket and Trello. This informed our approach to building a billing experience that felt familiar, reliable, and scalable for admins.
To ensure a consistent, high-quality experience across the end-to-end journey, I partnered with other designers to define a set of guiding design principles. These principles grounded our work in shared values and proved essential during moments of critique, tradeoff decisions, and alignment across teams. The design principles focused on encouraging loyalty through thoughtful enforcement, building trust through transparency, respecting user intent while offering a clear path forward, and engaging the right people at the right time.
We began by focusing on four key user flows: monthly upgrade, monthly downgrade, annual upgrade, and annual downgrade. Mapping these flows uncovered additional edge cases driven by customer requirements such as payment methods, contract terms, and whether the account was in a trial or paid status, along with internal billing constraints.
After identifying these “micro” task flows, I collaborated with other designers to map the broader “macro” journey spanning marketing, product, and billing. This high-level journey mapping helped us identify early gaps across teams and coordinate solutions more effectively.
Journey Map
Once we identified the primary “micro” user task flow, I workshopped with other designers to map out the “macro” end to end journey across marketing, product and billing. This helped us identify early gaps so that each work stream can plan accordingly.
Design Process
Screen design v1: Applying the extensive components from the open-sourced Atlassian Design System and partnering closely with my content designer, I produced the initial flow as a template so that subsequent flows can follow. (see design in the Figma prototype below)
Frequent design sparring: There were 3 types of sparring that I tried to do for each sprint: scrum sparring (with PM and engineers), end to end sparring (with other designers in the project), weekly SF-office design sparrings (with other designers in the office for fresh minds).
Rapid user testing for additional feedback: With the help from our research team, we set up a quick user test on UserTesting with 10 participants to gain additional insight. This step was extremely helpful for our content iteration (since our flows were quite content and number heavy) and it still allowed us to move quickly throughout the sprint.
Iteration and additional rounds sparringShowcasing in working group (presentation and writing): Once the final iteration was made, I documented the end to end journeys and presented them to the bigger group. This was crucially important for teams to stay aligned on what we’re shipping to our customers.
Hand off to engineer & design QA during and post build
Results and Impact
MVP completed in time for the Premium plan launch which was a huge milestone for the company
The task completion rate for upgrade was at 85%, downgrade at 72% (downgrade was lower due to the fact that once users see the features they’re giving up in step 1, either they canceled the flow or decided to talk to support instead)
No surge in customer support ticket, except for the complex use case where high touch interaction is preferred
6 months after launch, all premium successful upgrade for existing customers contributed up to a significant uplift in Cloud MRR (one of key company’s OKRs) for Jira Software, Confluence and Jira Service Desk, which then plays a big role in Atlassian crossing the $1B revenue in FY20.
Once this foundational flows were built, over the next few years, various teams at Atlassian constantly experimented with different growth tactics to encourage more upgrades and to reduce downgrades.
Key Learnings
Working with complex systems and making it digestible for users
Technical/business/design tradeoff negotiation using our own Atlassian Play DACI framework
Communication in a large program to ensure end to end quality
Laid out the design framework for subsequent projects when we launched other product plans