Increasing Trial Activation for Product Led Growth

Led design and product effort that contributed to increased cloud subscription revenue by $20M

Atlassian’s primary strategy in 2019 was to move enterprise self-managed customers to the cloud. Customers were resistant, and cited many barriers, such as a lack of security features, SLAs and customization. As product teams built features to entice customers make the move, a new pricing model was developed to sell the new functionality as a ‘premium’ tier of product.

Atlassian openly shares all pricing on their website. It was already challenging to explain progressive pricing with one product tier. Introducing two additional tiers will make this problem exponentially more complex.

At the time, Atlassian had no direct sales - most product activations came from self-service workflows, with the pricing page being the primary entry point. The importance of having this page convey pricing clearly and plainly cannot be overstated.

Where it started: Jira pricing page with one product tier circa 2019

The existing pricing structure was already hard to understand for users - this was a known problem and several iterations of the pricing page had been built and tested. Pricing for Jira Software, for example, is a flat rate for up to 10 users, with progressive pricing for users above 10. As a customer expands their user base, price per user decreases at specific points. The concept was already confusing with just one pricing tier. Introducing two additional tiers makes this problem exponentially more complex.

My team (1 designer and 5 full stack engineers) was responsible for executing on the project.

In this role (hybrid PM and Design Lead) I was accountable for:

1. Setting the vision for the new pricing page 2. Ongoing communication with product and marketing leads across product verticals to align on messaging on their respective products 3. Partnering with Commerce (responsible for billing and pricing) to change hard-coded prices to be dynamically updated from the commerce backend 4. Complete the work on time for Premium product launch

• Make pricing easy to understand

• Clearly articulate the features in each product tier

• Frictionless start to trial

We talked to 2 types of users to find out how they make software purchase decisions - small teams and teams at large enterprises.

Small teams own the purchase decision and will not hesitate to start a trial. When they land on a pricing page, they will immediately scroll down to the feature list. They have specific tasks in mind and will want as much detail on features as possible. Pricing is less of a concern - they have a general cost in mind scan to make sure it’s in that ballpark.

Teams at large enterprises have to make a case for any software they use. They do a lot of research on features across different tools and bring that to a procurement team. The procurement team reviews the features with legal, compliance and security before deciding which tool to buy. Teams don’t always get what they want.

Early exploration with a simpler-to-build calculator

Early exploration with detailed price breakdown. Few users needed this much information.

The design accommodated extremes - prices in JPY require a lot more space.

Being responsible for the development schedule, I was able to arrange for engineers to be much closer to the design process. Devs were included in many design reviews and were able to assess feasibility during the design exploration phase, sharing feedback and suggestions. This streamlined a lot of communication and we were able to move much faster.

This close collaboration allowed us to push the limits of what we could build. We successfully hid a lot of complexity behind a single slider, as the dev team saw the simplicity of the user experience and worked hard to make it a reality.

The slider looks deceptively simple, but was a highly complex piece of code. Design and dev worked closely making sure all the states worked properly.

We discovered through user interviews having images of each feature was highly useful and a differentiator in choosing to start a trial. I worked closely with Product Marketing to have these created - clicking on each row in the feature table will open a modal with more detail and an image of the feature.

The comparison tables (middle image) were a big design challenge for the mobile view.

The in-product experience has different use case - we already know who you are and how many users/add-ons you have. I worked closely with the product teams to share learnings and keep the pricing experience consistent across the platform.

Premium was launched across Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk and Jira Core. Post launch, we saw a steady increase in free trial activations across all four products. 6 months after launch, premium accounts 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 played a big role in Atlassian crossing the $1B revenue in FY20.