Every successful business runs on three pillars:

• Desirability
• Viability
• Feasibility

Business create and delivers something of value (Feasibilty) that people want or need (Desirability) so that business brings in enough profits to make it worth while for owners to continue operations (Viability) in a way that satisifies needs and expectations (Product Experience).

In this case study, I am exploring how Atlassian’s Confluence is creating value for one of its customer which is a startup founder.

Desirability

Key desires of a startup founder

A startup founder requires an online tool for documenting and organising his ideas, research, planning activities and meeting notes such that he can share some of these documents with his team members anywhere, be it in office or outside office so that they all can collaborate on it.

Persona

Mayank Gupta has completed his Masters in Finance from London. He now plans to start his business in India with the idea of Crowdfunding. He do some research on how the crowdfunding system works in India, the rules and regulations and the competitors in this industry. He documents all his thoughts on online sheets and some in his laptop.

He searches for a co-founder who has a better network of investors, who can invest in various small projects that are looking for funding. He approaches his friend Yuvraj Seth living in Netherlands. They both agree upon the idea and starts making a list of investors and the projects that require funding. They remotely hire a team of website developer, marketing speacialist and a designer to launch a website for crowdfunding. They discuss and plan the ideas reagrding launching of the website but they struggle to maintain a log of these daily activities. A lot of their time is wasted in finding the information and sending the information to every team member.

As they progress in their projects, they realise the communication gaps are increasing not only among team members but also among the co-founders who are now dealing the different segments of the business.

How Confluence solves this problem

Mayank searches online for a documentation tool that can help alleviate this problem. He comes across the website of Confluence. He realises that it has tons of features that can help his business in being organised; it is remote friendly and it is free for upto 10 members. This means that is is free for his business as he currently has only 5 members in his team including himself.

Pains that are being solved by Confluence

1. It is free to use for upto 10 members.
2. It is remote friendly and can be accessed either through desktop or through phone via mobile app.
3. It allows its users to create different workspaces and allow them to organise the documents in different tabs.
4. It allows the team members to comment, like, share or edit the documents.

Gains that got added by Confluence

1. From product requirements to marketing plans, it has many in built templates which help its users to start of with documentation easily.
2. It can allow the users to co-edit together at the real time. This means that when a person is editing a document, the other person can also simultaneuosly edit it. The other person do not have to wait for the access.
3. The owner recevies the highlights of the changes made in his document the team members. This helps the owner to track all the changes that have been made in his original documents.
4. It allows the user to restrict the access of workspace to only those members that you invited. This means that when you create different workspaces on the Confluence, not all the team members can view all your workspaces. You can give them the access to the selected ones only.
5. Just like social media apps, you get notifications when any member edit, add or change the document in your workspace. This helps you remain updated about your workspace.

Viability

Started in Australia in 2002, Atlassian is a development and collaboration software company. It is constantly increasing its offerings for software management, project management and content management. Confluence is the second product that was built by Atlassian in 2004.

What is the viability of Atlassian?

The co-founders, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, saw the need for developer-specific tools around tracking issues and collaborating with one another. They built these functions into their first two tools — Jira and Confluence. They decided to use a freemium plan to allow people to test out the tools without risk, and realize for themselves how useful they were.

This model allowed a lot of people to start using the tools really quickly — and as they onboarded more customers and grew revenue without sales overhead, they were able to start acquiring other companies and adding to their developer offerings very early on in their company’s lifetime.

Instead of spending time building more of their own tools, they’d buy ones that were already successful.

This lead them to acquire comapnies like Cenqua, Trello, Mindville, Halp etc. These tools filled the gaps in Atlassian’s product offerings and helped them cater to every kind of organization- be it large enterprise level or small startups.

Business Strategy of Atlassian

Atlassian spend only 19% of their revenue on sales and marketing, a fraction of the spend of other companies of their size.

The key components for driving its growth are — a great product, with a passionate userbase who are willing to become advocates for their products both internally and externally. With a tight feedback loop between product, marketing and its end-users, Atlassian is able to create a high-efficiency distribution flywheel to propel its business forward.

Atlassian’s Distribution Flywheel

Value Proposition

The value propositions offered by Atlassian to its customers are price, customisation, cost and risk reduction, and convenience.

How Atlassian sustained its business model for such long time?

1. By building a large base of customers. This has beenbe helpful in two ways. It has reduced the bargaining power of the buyers plus it helped in building economies of scale so that it can lower the fixed cost per unit.
2. Building capacities and spending money on research and development leading to innovation of new products and services
3. By being service oriented rather than just product oriented.
4. By understanding the core need of the customer rather than what the customer is buying.
5. By increasing the switching cost for the customers.
6. Collaborating with competitors to increase the market size rather than just competing for small market.

Feasibility

Confluence

It is a great knowlege managing tool for enterprises. It can keep Project’s Meeting Notes, Emails, Requirements, Retrospectives, etc., all in one place.

Confluence’s setup is very similar to any page or content building application. It has a powerhouse of tools that will allow for everyone to access, download, copy, update, and print to file (either in Word, or PDF format). All the documents can be shared and kept neatly organized on a wiki page. It can easily search the notes and documents when required.

Spaces

Pages are stored in spaces — workspaces where the user can collaborate on work and keep all the content organized.The user can create as many or as few spaces as the team needs. For example, one marketing team might keep all of its work in one space, with a page for each campaign, while another might set up a separate space for every single campaign. Each space comes with an overview (or homepage) and a blog, so it’s easy to share updates and announcements with your whole team.

Different spaces created in Confluence

Page tree

The user can organize space content with a hierarchical page tree that makes finding work quick and easy. To organize pages, one can nest pages under related spaces and pages in just about any way.

Other features of Confluence

• Wide Variety of Templates
  It has around 75 templates with pre-filled and preset fields, ready to be updated.
  Some of the examples of templates we can find are:
  a. Product Requirement pages, allowing team to define the document properties, create the requirements, and then track progress.
  b. Jira Report pages that provide a pre-filled page that can outline the status of the existing tickets from a project.
  c. Meeting Notes pages that provide a pre-filled page with dates and listed actions and tasks that any member of the team can be attached to.
  d. Retrospective pages that pre-fill the “What did we do well?” and “What should we have done better?” discussion sections for a member’s retrospectives.

Templates in Confluenc

• It can help a team in being more agile by facilitating open communication through its in-built templates like
  Sprint Planning,
  Sprint Reviews,
  Daily Scrums,
  Retrospectives, etc
• It allow the team members to “mention” another. This will allow those who are mentioned to receive an email about the update on the page. Therefore, the process of communication is already automated.
• It has a function to add member to “watch” a page. This is helpful when it is required that the specific members of a project need to be informed. They can easily be added as a “watcher” to that page, so that any update will automatically be emailed to them. Not only will they receive the link to that page, but they will also get to see what was changed, added, or deleted from that page.
• It allows page versioning. Confluence keeps versions of the page automatically, so that we can revert back to the previous version. No information is lost, unless we deliberately delete it.

Ideas to improve this product

1. The product is not intuitive to use. You might need to watch few tutorials to get the best out of it. Its navigation might also be difficult to understand for new users.
2. The search feature could be improved. Search result are not always what we are looking for.
3. It does not play well with Microsoft generated documents like word and excel.
4. It is built to solve problems at enterprise level but it is not easy to use for personal level. It does not include features like portfolio managment, time and expense tracking etc.
5. Though Confluence provides the purpose of each template but it is difficult to ascertain its structure and components. It doesn’t provide a preview of that template before committing to create one. So sometimes it can be hit and trial process for finding a right template or may be deleting it and creating a blank new page.
6. Though Confluence has seamless integration with Jira but for a startup founder, the interface of Jira can be quite intimidating. For this, Trello is easy to use project management tool for startups and confluence can provide integration with Trello as well.

References

https://usefyi.com/atlassian-history/

https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/scale-how-atlassian-built-a-20-billion-dollar-company-with-no-sales-team/

http://fernfortuniversity.com/term-papers/porter5/analysis/3965-atlassian-corporation-plc.php

https://www.ukessays.com/essays/management/atlassian-software-company-strategic-management-evaluation.php