Megan Cook: evaluation

Transcript context

…We actually had a podcast episode recently Judd, where we talking about NPS and how much there's data showing it's not actually a great predictor of anything, and he's a big fan of CSAT instead. So you could almost think of it as little replacement for NPS in a lot of cases. And I'm sorry, pushed you off track. Keep going. Yeah, no worries. So he cared really deeply about this, asked me to look into it. Even though this request was coming from the top, that doesn't mean that it gets any sort of funding. So we went through a couple of different steps to see what was worth investing in here. First of all, I mentioned we had that survey and so we had really rich feedback. So it's not just a rating, what we get, we get people talking about why they gave that rating and that can really help us zero in on what are the key aspects that's bringing this down. And we also had great conversations with our customers. It was the kinds of conversations that are really rich and really helpful, but so painful to listen to and go through because you're seeing somebody really struggle with something that you thought was going to bring them so much value. And then we had a look at, well, what is this going to impact? And so logically it's what we found was that usability was one of the key reasons, like I said. And logically, if your product is hard to use in places, if some of the core actions are hard for people to do, then a new user to that product or a new customer is going to have a longer ramp up time. You've got a harder time showing them that there's value. And even for an existing customer that's using your product really well, when they bring on a new user, that user might have a really hard time getting up to speed and using it and it just completely slows them down. So from a business point of view, it can impact your new customer acquisition as well as your ability to expand. So there was some good revenue connections in there as well. What I also found was that we have a lot of dependencies. So we've got all of these platform teams and a lot of the improvements that would be really good to make to sort out this problem depended on many, many teams around Atlassian. And they all had different goals and other products that they had to serve too. I don't know if you've ever tried to align three or four different roadmaps so that the timing is just right to get some improvement through, but it's basically impossible. There was no way that was going to happen. But we did find that they were really passionate about this area and improving usability. So we worked together to find a low cost way for those teams to help us make the changes that we need to, but they didn't have to bear the brunt of all the development costs. So each of those teams flipped forward, we call them a shepherd, so that as our developers came in and made changes in the code base that this shepherd would make sure that they weren't causing any issues and we're doing reviews and reviews of designs and things like that. And so getting that buy-in, finding the data to support the reason why this was important. And then we constructed the roadmap so that we found this sort of a low cost, very cheap way to have some impactful change early on. I think that was really, really important. why this was important. And then we constructed the roadmap so that we found this sort of a low cost, very cheap way to have some impactful change early on. I think that was really, really important. And so we put together just some of the designs for what the experiences were going to look like. So our head of design, Charlie Sutton at the moment has this great mantra of show don't tell. And in this case, it was just at the core of getting people excited because you could show the initial experience, you could show the pain, you could bring in a video of the customer trying to use it and what they thought of it. And that just really brought that emotional aspect to it. It helped get people on board on the issue, the new experience, which is just far and away molds better, might cut out like 20 clicks or whatever. And so all that worked together to get the investment that we needed. I think the last thing that was useful there actually is that we started pretty small too. So I think if you have a hypothesis and you can start small, you can get that investment more easily, you can show success, you can always build on that in the future to get more and more. But in this case, we got about 40 people to come and join onto this. And then as we shipped things, we just made sure that it kept being quite small. And so we got that momentum really quickly. We kept with regular updates, we kept up the excitement about what the team was doing. At one stage, the team picked out something that was pretty impactful throughout the whole thing. So that was dark mode. That took a lot of coordination around the whole company to make that thing happen. But it was well overdue, we loved it. And then the feedback that we got as well really helps with that. Actually just yesterday, I saw some feedback on one of the changes we'd made recently, and this customer said it was the best quality of life improvement they've seen in a long time, which just the way that's phrased even, that gets you excited about the impact that you're having on that person.…

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