Liam
Confluence
Case study
Confluence was having a midlife crisis. Traditionally catering to technical teams, it had grown complex and confusing over time. Many teams saw it simply as “Jira Docs” or their corporate “Wiki.” Meanwhile, products like Notion were showing teams what collaborative content workspaces could actually look and feel like.
We were tasked with reinventing Confluence Cloud as a collaborative workspace for all teams. This required reimagining our product strategy, experience, and go-to-market motion from the ground up.
🎯 Impact
- Increased growth - YoY growth went from ~40% to 52% and ARR increased by over 400%
- Scaled the design team - Grew from 3 to 12+ designers while maintaining quality
- Defined product direction - Co-authored the strategy that guided 3+ years of development
- Improved core experiences - Redesigned everything from content organization to page creation, editing, and collaboration
Snapshots
Confluence’s Next Play
Confluence was losing ground to newer collaboration tools. Our user feedback was consistent: the product felt complex and outdated. Growth was slowing, and teams were choosing competitors that felt more modern and intuitive.
We had a large user base of mostly technical users, but adjacent, non-technical teams found Confluence hard to adopt. The experience felt stuck in the past while competitors were defining what modern collaboration should look like.
Approach
Instead of making incremental improvements, our leadership team collaborated on a comprehensive strategy called “Confluence’s Next Play,” a plan to transform Confluence from a technical wiki into a modern, collaborative workspace.
Our strategy document for transforming Confluence
3 strategic pillars: simplify the product, fix our broken funnel, and a more tailored experience
Impact
This strategy became our north star for the next 3+ years. It aligned our organization around a clear vision and contributed to significant growth - between 2017 and 2020 YoY growth increased from around 40% to 52%, and ARR grew by over 400%.
Show, don’t tell
Strategy documents are easy to write but not always immediately understood across a large organization. We needed everyone (designers, engineers, product managers) to feel fully bought in to directions we’d set.
Approach
I worked with our lead designers to create a complementary set of mockups and vignettes showing what Confluence could look like after our transformation. Our goal was to render our strategy visually so that teams felt more connected to our overarching principles and directions.
Your work: From information overload to personalized, useful dashboard
Space directory: From long lists to visual, organized spaces
Search: From basic text search to contextual content discovery
Page metadata: From ad-hoc to organized
Templates: From clunky to streamlined
Macros: From many confusing steps to always at your fingertips
Impact
These designs helped start a rallying cry. By making strategy visual, teams across Confluence could more easily prioritize projects that supported the vision, and leadership could communicate our direction clearly. This generated excitement across Atlassian about what Confluence could become.
Confluence + Invision = Influence 😉
Our design team was deeply familiar with Confluence’s existing patterns, which sometimes limited our thinking. To reinvent Confluence we needed to get out of our comfort zone and explore new systems, patterns, and ideas.
Approach
I introduced an exercise where we mapped Confluence’s content, information architecture and workflows onto competitors’ interfaces. This helped us see our own product with fresh eyes and explore new possibilities.
One such exploration mapped Confluence onto InVision’s interface. While not meant for production, it sparked new thinking about navigation and content organization that proved invaluable as our product suite evolved.
Mapping Confluence’s objects and IA on top of InVision
A fresh take on Confluence’s home feed
Leaning into more social cues
Impact
These explorations pushed our thinking beyond incremental improvements. Ideas from this exercise influenced Atlassian’s later navigation redesign and helped our team see new possibilities for how collaborative tools could work.
Building momentum & aligning teams
Good strategies fail when teams don’t understand or embrace them. Our design team was growing quickly, and we needed everyone to feel ownership of Confluence’s new direction.
Approach
Alongside my cross-functional leadership team, we organized and ran multiple workshops that brought our strategy to life for the entire team. These sessions let designers, product managers, and engineers explore what our strategy meant for their specific projects and directions.
Workshopping Confluence’s Next Play
The beginning of our rallying cry
Impact
These sessions created shared ownership of our direction. Leaders became advocates, cascading our vision throughout their teams.
Turning strategy into meaningful progress
Strategy only matters if you can execute on it. Over 18 months, we executed on multiple projects, big and small. Here are two examples:
Drag and Drop: Making Organization Simple
Users complained that organizing content in Confluence was time consuming and clunky. Drag and drop would simplify organization and deliver several key business wins as more users became what we referred to as “gardeners”, contributing to an overall improvement in ease-of-use for all users.
Drag and drop
Impact
The New Editor: Managing Complexity at Scale
Redesigning the editor was one of the most complex projects in Confluence’s history. Millions of active users relied on it daily, each with specific workflows and expectations. Any misstep could create a wave of user pain and frustration across our product.
The challenge wasn’t just design but managing risk across a massive, active user base while delivering a fundamentally better experience.
My role focused on three areas: coaching through the complexity, triaging experience risks alongside my design leaders, and making tough experience quality calls during the rollout.
We eventually landed on a gradual rollout process with clear graduation criteria for each milestone. This allowed us to ship functionality in stages, measuring CSAT and user sentiment at each step.
The Confluence editor
The rollout wasn’t always smooth. We managed multiple clean escalations when experience risks threatened the project timeline. Issues like migration journey complexity and split-brain tolerance between old and new editors required executive-level decisions about scope and timeline.
Impact
We went on to deliver these and other projects that fundamentally transformed Confluence. User satisfaction increased and our business began to grow again. Each success built confidence in our direction and momentum for bigger changes to come.
Goofing off 😜
Team offsite in Sydney, taking time out to play
The team not taking ourselves too seriously
Reflections
Leading design at Confluence taught me two essential lessons about leadership: strategy work is hard, cross-functional work that requires deep interrogation of your business, product and competitive landscape, but even harder is the work of getting everyone excited about it. A well-researched vision gives you credibility; a rallying cry gives you momentum. You need both to transform an established product.
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