Enable hybrid
customers
across the
Atlassian suit
DISCIPLINE
Product Design · UX Research · Systems Thinking
TEAM
Lead Designer · Cross-functional team
METHODOLOGY
Research-led, iterative
YEAR
2023
● CONTEXT
Connect enterprise teams across every deployment
—
without forcing them to choose.
By 2023, Atlassian Cloud could support the entire product development lifecycle. Enterprise customers weren't using it that way. They were running Jira Data Centre for engineering, layering in competitor tools — GitHub, Aha!, Asana, Smartsheet - where Atlassian's cloud offering didn't yet reach, and not making the connection between the tools they were paying for and the tools they actually needed.
Two risks were compounding quietly. Customers who stayed comfortable in Data Centre weren't experiencing what Atlassian Cloud could do - and without that experience, there was no reason to migrate. At the same time, every non-Atlassian tool that entered the stack was a retention risk. Teams that built workflows around competitor products didn't need Atlassian to make the case for Cloud. They'd already made a different decision.
The project had two goals: accelerate cloud adoption, and prevent churn. Not by pushing customers toward Cloud, but by connecting Data Centre and Cloud so seamlessly that the value became self-evident.
Integration as proof - not migration pressure.
● IMPACT SNAPSHOT
Three signals that defined the brief — before a wireframe was drawn.
60%
of enterprise customers rated cross-instance collaboration a top investment priority - ranked among the highest of 15 areas surveyed
(EES, n=102 Cloud Enterprise customers)
25%-30%
of Jira Cloud users are non-technical business roles - the segment most likely to abandon the platform when hybrid friction makes it unworkable
3yrs
of existing Atlassian research reframed - from infrastructure connectivity to human workflow, establishing The Process Creator as a primary underserved archetype
"Your products work better together than they do by themselves - and that's what we're sold and that's what people use. But it means that you can't just start thinking in isolation, because there is just so much integration between all of this."
Enterprise Customer, Teleport Research
● AUDIENCE
The Process Creator is a Product Manager, Scrum Master, or Tech Lead who owns how their team works — but has no admin access to the tools they depend on. They're fluent in process, not in product configuration. They know exactly what the team needs; they can't build it themselves. At a smaller company, they might work closely with the Atlassian admin. At a larger one, their relationship with IT runs entirely through a ticketing queue. Their daily reality is: submit a request, wait days for a change that should take minutes, and then find out it wasn't quite right.
HYPOTHESIS
If we improve the integration and connectivity between Atlassian's on-premises and cloud products, then project managers working in hybrid environments will be able to track and manage project progress in one place — because they will no longer need to manually transfer data between deployments. This eliminates both the human error risk and the double-reporting tax that currently discourages adoption of new Atlassian tools.
Hybrid setup landscape
To understand the opportunity, we first needed to map the landscape. What tools are being used at each stage of the development process — from discovery and planning through to build, release, and operations? And critically: does Atlassian Cloud already offer a product that does the same job?
The answer, almost everywhere, was yes. The problem wasn't a gap in Atlassian's product portfolio. It was that customers weren't making the connection between the tools they were already paying for and the tools they were using instead.
Caption: Mapping the full product development lifecycle against the tools enterprise customers actually use — and identifying where Atlassian Cloud already has a replacement, and where it doesn't.
Users of hybrid setup
Mapping the tools wasn't enough. We needed to understand who was using them and when - because different roles meant different pain points, different levels of technical fluency, and very different relationships with the tools they depend on.
One pattern stood out: the Project Manager is the only person engaged across every stage of the development process. While engineers work primarily in Jira Data Centre and designers stay in their own tool set, the PM touches everything. That made them the highest-value archetype to design for - and, as it turned out, the strongest narrative for making the solution tangible to senior leadership.
Different types
of hybrid setup
Think of hybrid setup as an archetype - each org configures it differently based on their tools, teams, and migration stage.
● EXPLORATION
Research.
Three years of data - desk research, interviews, surveys, and field research at Jira Days. The same frustration kept surfacing: admins didn't know what they could connect, or why it would matter. That gap became the brief.
● EXPLORATION
Sketches.
Sketches are where I work out logic, not aesthetics. This one asked: how does an admin see the full picture without being overwhelmed? The answer became the Connection Hub.
● EXPLORATION
Wireframes
Structure before visuals. Three paths for an admin: connect DC products, connect Cloud tools, or create a custom config. The recommendation layer below wasn't in the brief - the wireframes made it obvious it had to be there.
● LET'S WORK TOGETHER
Got a project?
Let's talk.
andpon - Andrzej Poniatowski
© 2026