Personas for Atlassian Apps

The most important aspect of any app business are the users. At K15t, we created personas that represent the various types of users that try, buy, or generally interact with our apps as a part of how they collaborate in a team.

When we consider how individuals, teams, and organizations use our apps to make their lives better, we need to remember that they are real people – just like us. The personas we've created help us to understand these groups of people. We're able to better describe and prioritize user needs, deliver more value, and make informed decisions that take into account all the different personas that might be affected by a change or new feature.

But we’re also careful not to get lost in specific personal details. We know we have a large and diverse user base, so we focus more on the roles, goals, and business-related challenges of these personas, rather than information like age, gender, ethnicity, or generation.

When building, marketing, or selling an app or solution, it’s easy to focus just on the product or service itself. But the fact is, people don’t buy a product or service – they buy something based on the benefit it offers them. No one buys a drill, for example; they buy the ability to make a hole.

In this sense, personas force us to hone in on the users (and potential users) and their particular goals and challenges.

Personas Help Us Think and Talk About Our Users

Personas are fictional characters that represent specific user types for our apps that describe their goals and needs. They help us understand and empathize with our users and customers in various ways:

• In product marketing, personas guide messaging and communication strategies by helping the team understand the language, tone, and channels that resonate with each persona.

• In user research, we can better identify the users we need to talk to and advocate for those user needs in the product teams.

• In product design and development, personas help prioritize and design features to meet users’ needs.

• In roles like customer success and customer service, who interact with individual users on a regular basis, we use personas to better relate to the person they are interacting with.

At K15t, we decided not to include specific demographics and behaviors, because these different dimensions would make our personas more complex to work with.

That said, we still consider these criteria. For example, we design for more or less tech-savvy users and prioritize accessibility to help cater to users with disabilities or impairments.

Generic Personas for All Atlassian Apps

Since we first created the personas in 2017 for our Scroll Apps, we found that the users of any app on the Atlassian platform share a lot of similarities. This means our personas can be used for all kinds of apps, and they work for both Confluence and Jira apps.

Additionally, our teams have refined some of the personas to clarify what they mean to them. Some personas are equally relevant for each app, while some may be irrelevant entirely. Some personas may not interact with an app but still may be successful.

The K15t Personas

The K15t, we consider the personas who work both inside and outside of the customer's organization. (See below for the specific roles and descriptions of each persona).

They all have some kind of relationship to one another, which explains their needs better:

• Maggie and Conrad work together in a team to build a product. In most cases, there is more than one Conrad in Maggie’s team.

• Yussuf is the user (and customer) of the organization. Yussuf is the person that Maggie and Conrad are trying to deliver value to.

• Aziza supports Maggie and Conrad by providing them with the Atlassian infrastructure.

• Erika is the leader of Maggie, Conrad, and Aziza’s organization.

• Pablo is supporting Aziza and her organization.

All personas have a first name that sounds similar to their role name and an adjective that describes their character to make them more memorable to our teams.

Any specific demographic information, like gender or age, should be disregarded.

Erika, the Guiding Executive

Erika is responsible for a business. She isn’t actively involved in working on products or services. Instead, she relies on Maggie and Conrad to deliver products and services to Yussuf (and that they share their information, knowledge, and skills).

“If we fail to communicate our product value, we will lose customers.”

– Erika, the guiding executive

Job titles:
CEO, Head of product/department, Executive director, Senior manager, Product owner/manager.

Their goals:
Establishing a reputation for competence and effectiveness, avoiding disasters, ensuring company success, fostering harmony among teams, and demonstrating thought leadership.

What keeps them awake at night:
Concerns related to company and department profit and loss, competition, employee dissatisfaction, lack of visibility into problems, and resistance to change.

What they are after:
They are after achieving a return on investment, establishing an improved feedback loop, avoiding the need for rework, and ensuring security and protection against knowledge theft.

Maggie, the Controlling Manager

Maggie is responsible for delivering a product or service that Yussuf can benefit from. She can’t achieve that on her own, so she needs Conrad on her team to help her.

“How am I supposed to get the product delivered to the user and make sure they know how to use it well?”

– Maggie

Job titles:
Product/project manager, Team lead, Technical lead, Tech writer (Scroll-only), Content manager (Scroll-only), Documentation lead (Scroll-only).

Their goals:
Achieving the business goals set by executives, maintaining a sense of control, having visibility into the process, meeting deadlines, delivering quality results, having measurable metrics, satisfying end users, and receiving recognition for success.

What keeps them awake at night:
Concerns regarding budget and staffing constraints, complexity and bureaucracy hindering progress, lack of control over deadlines and workflows, ambiguous authority, pressure from executives, lack of credit for a job well done, and being solely blamed when things go wrong.

What are they after:
They are after reliable data and information, the ability to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time, maintaining control over their work, and having access to metrics for tracking and evaluation.

Conrad, the Busy Contributor

Conrad is a team member working on a product or service and knows a lot about it. In order to enable Yussuf, he needs to contribute his information, knowledge, and skills.

“There are still so many bugs in the product to fix.”

– Conrad

Job titles:
Software engineer, Product manager, UX Designer

Their goals:
As subject matter experts they provide valuable knowledge to others in the company about the ins-and-outs of the field or industry that the product operates in.

Steer the development of the product and/or the development of requirements, design and technical specifications.

Advice on the correct use and application of ideas, concepts and terminology.

What keeps them awake at night:
Being stressed and overworked from the extra burden of teaching others (not their actual job).

Knowing that they're loosing precious time by having to explain the same technical details over and over again to different silos in the company.

Hearing other teams pass on wrong or incomplete information to others in the company, or worse, to customers.

What they are after:
Conrad wants to make use of his voice to amplify the knowledge he has – beyond the company's silos and borders.

He'd like to help improve the quality and accuracy of the companies documentation but he can't afford to invest too much time or get too distracted from his other tasks.

Yussuf, the Consuming User

Yussuf has a problem that he is trying to solve by using the product or service that Maggie and Conrad provide. To solve the problem, he will need information, knowledge, and skills that help him use the product well.

Yussuf is usually part of the organization that purchases our customer's product or service, but he may also be part of our customer's own organization. In that case, he'll try to solve the problems of others.

“How does the product or service help me solve my problem?”

– Yussuf

Job titles:
any (depending on the product or service the organization builds), Customer support agents, Support engineer, Marketer/marketing manager, Sales people, Consultants

Their goals:
Problem-solving, improved job performance, task execution, quick and easy information retrieval, recognition from managers, seamless collaboration, access to current and accurate information, efficient information sharing, storage, and export, and decreased project completion time.

What keeps them awake at night:
Challenges in finding information and solutions, unreliable project and information management tools, adapting to change, limited functionality in tools, nonexistent information, pressure from managers and executives, and confusion regarding task ownership and management.

What they are after:
They are after staying updated on the latest information, the ability to share, store, and export information, and minimizing delays in creative processes.

Aziza, the Implementing IT Admin

Aziza is responsible for running the Atlassian infrastructure in her organization. As part of this, she configures and customizes apps to some extent.

Aziza is usually part of the customer organization, but she may also be part of the organization that is creating the product, or of an organization that is in an advising role to the user of the product.

“I need to make sure that Jira and Confluence work well for my users.”

– Aziza

Job titles:
IT Admin, Technical/team lead, IT manager, Atlassian tool admin

Their goals:
Achieving high performance, ensuring usability, maintaining uptime and reliability, organizing the tech stack clearly, ensuring data security, future-proofing their systems, promoting compatibility, receiving recognition for success, and enabling upgradability.

What keeps them awake at night:
They are kept awake at night due to pressure from executives, concerns about obsolescence and incompatibility, dealing with bugs and unreliability, addressing poor performance and usability issues, managing frustrated tool users, dealing with managers and executives who lack knowledge in technical matters, facing budget constraints, navigating technical functionality limitations (including those related to Atlassian tools and others), and shouldering blame for failures, whether justified or not.

Pablo, the Consulting Partner

Pablo (unlike the other personas) is never our direct customer: he helps our potential and actual customers solve their problems using our apps. To do so, he helps to select the right apps and to install, configure, and customize those apps.

“There are so many apps and solutions out there. How am I going to select the right one for my client?”

– Pablo

Job titles:
Not just one specific job title, but Pablo is a employee of:
Atlassian Solution Partners (different roles here - Most common title: Consultant)

Pablo often appears in combination with other Personas like Erika or Maggie.

Their goals:
Solve client challenges by convincing the client to solve their requirements by using existing apps instead of coming up with custom developments that don’t scale and have satisfied customers with the best solution. A happy customer is a loyal customer.

Grow product (licence) sale revenue; (Bigger user tier, new clients, cross-sales) - Since EOL Server with focus on Cloud revenue.

Loyal customers are the key to growing sales numbers: App renewals are most important (I want to keep my clients)!

What keeps them awake:
Loosing a customer; Complexity of customers' requirements; Complexity/bureaucracy resulting from Atlassian's growth; Stressful time factors; Customers lack trust for Cloud

What they are after:
Great Support; Simplicity; Discounts; Good Enablement; Valuable Partners.

Technical Tips

We have created a single Confluence page for each persona named after the persona name plus “(Persona)” as a prefix. That way, the persona can be easily linked throughout feature specs, design research, etc.