From intent to revenue: Fueling growth at Atlassian

I spent seven and a half years at Atlassian working on products like Jira, Confluence, and Loom. Throughout that time, one question kept coming back to me: what actually drives revenue growth? Not in theory. In practice.

What I found, after years of watching numbers move (and not move), after running monetization programs and building motions from self-serve into sales-led accounts, is that the biggest accelerator isn't acquisition. It's not pricing. It's not even your product. It's customer intent.

That's not an obvious conclusion. When you're missing revenue targets, the instinct is almost always to go find more customers. So, you focus on acquisition, get more people in the door. Then, the quarter ends and the whole cycle starts again. You acquire more customers, you don't do much with them, and you wonder why nothing's changing.

The demand is usually already there. The problem is that we're not acting on it.

What intent actually means

Before we get into the examples, it's worth being clear about what I mean when I say "intent."

Intent is when someone is trying to do something that matters. It shows up in behavior, often long before anyone upgrades, purchases, expands, or picks up the phone to talk to sales.

Intent shows up in behavior – in clicks, in setup actions, in customers getting stuck in the same place repeatedly, or coming back to the same screen again and again. All of that is intent, and all of it is signal.

If you can learn to read and respond to intent signals, you can improve conversion, improve customer experience, and accelerate revenue in ways that feel sustainable rather than forced.

I’m going to walk you through three real examples from my time at Atlassian that show what this looks like in practice.

Example one: Moving from time-based to intent-based journeys

A few years ago, we relaunched Jira. As part of that relaunch, we made a deliberate decision to land customers in the premium tier rather than the free tier we'd been using previously. The logic made sense: we'd been seeing healthy upgrade rates from free to premium, and landing customers in premium was supposed to shorten the path to adoption and reduce friction.

We launched, and a lot of customers went through the trial and then downgraded immediately. So, we went back and looked at our onboarding and activation programs. The strategy seemed right. The flows were there. The content was there. The issue was timing.

See, it was a time-based program. Every customer was getting the same message about the same thing, on the same schedule, regardless of what they were doing in the product. 

If you were actively exploring features and clearly ready to move forward, you were hearing the exact same thing as someone who hadn't even really engaged yet. If you were ready to purchase, you were still getting the same generic sequence as someone who was stuck on step one.

At best, it came across as disjointed. At worst, it was completely irrelevant. And if something's irrelevant, why would a customer pay attention to it?

Following the customer's lead

Once we’d pinpointed the problem, we went back to the drawing board. We sat down with our data science and product marketing teams, looked at what actions customers were taking in the product, let that information guide how we built our flows, and delivered more personalized experiences.

But here's the part that I think matters most: we stopped pushing what we wanted customers to do. Instead, we started paying attention to what they were actually trying to do, and focused on helping them complete those actions and move forward in their journey.

That shift alone increased our activation rate by 40%.

Example two: Recognizing decision moments

About five years ago, we launched a free SKU for Confluence. It was doing what we hoped, in some ways. Customers were coming in, they were using the product, usage was solid, but they weren't upgrading. They were just staying in the free version.

Now, that's fine up to a point. You don't want to push customers toward something they don't need. But I was running the monetization team, and my goal was to help customers move to paid when they were ready, when they needed to, and when they were showing clear signals that they wanted to.