jschumacher

Yeah, it definitely used to be pretty bad. But to be fair, it’s gotten better over the past few weeks.

I was at Atlassian during the OpsGenie acquisition and part of that process. Honestly, the biggest surprise to me was how long it took to shut down OpsGenie as a standalone product.

The broader trend here is the shift from unbundling to consolidation. Over the past decade, many “features” were created as standalone SaaS products, but that era is winding down. We’re now seeing the pendulum swing back, with more consolidation across the industry.

In my opinion, OpsGenie should have been a built-in feature of Jira Service Management from day one of the acquisition.

It’s a tricky balance. It would be easy for Atlassian to add settings. But every setting adds complexity. And I think we can all agree that we don’t want Jira to be more complex.

It takes a short time to adjust to UI changes, but settings live on forever.

Once you host your videos with Loom and link them everywhere, the moat ain’t that small anymore. Also, their AI features are excellent.

But certainly agree that more competition entered the space in the last couple of years.

The product suite differs significantly from 2015. Put aside new and acquired products like Trello and OpsGenie, the existing products have significantly expanded their capabilities and added Premium and Enterprise tiers.

Revenue in 2015 was $320M, In 2021 it was $2B. That kind of growth requires growth in Supporting functions and infrastructure teams, not just in product.

> Funny thing is jira is such a mess Atlassian introduced jira service desk more focused on tickets while the former can also do that.

Not quite. Service Desk (aka Service Management today) has a number of capabilities that differ quite significantly from Jira Software. The most obvious is the end-user facing help portal. But how users are managed is quite different, it has SLAs, different reporting, a knowledge base, etc. Just like Jira Software is flexible but tailored to software teams with boards, backlogs and sprints, Jira Service Management is tailored to IT teams and requirements specific to that market.

I was the head of product for the developer tools at Atlassian in 2012. We thought long and hard about taking Bitbucket cloud and packaging it in a VM (which is what GitHub did at the time) or leveraging the platforms we’ve already built for Confluence and Jira that would give us access control and a plug-in system from day 1. It was a tough call.

Ultimately we’ve decided to build on top of our server platforms and target companies with 1000+ employees from day one. That decision had a huge impact on how we approached performance and what features we prioritised. The hierarchy of projects and permissions associated with them as well as the way we designed Pull Requests are good examples of that.

It was the right decision at the time, even if the product happened to be different in cloud and server, which did lead to some confusion. But Stash customers were really happy with the product.

Bitbucket Server, which some people are referring to here, was build from the ground up, tailored to a self hosting environment.

Not quite. Bitbucket was acquired in 2011, only supported Mercurial and was missing a lot of features, including the pull request available today.

We've been looking for an easy and affordable way to share "what's new" with our customers. Finally a pricing that doesn't make this prohibitive for smaller startups.

It's not supposed to sound attractive, but investors will largely care about the YoY growth of 121% for Q2.

They spend a ton of money on Sales & Marketing (293,577k in the last fiscal year). That's what's driving a lot of their growth I assume and it's a lever they can pull back to increase profitability.

In particular for ecommerce sites it pays to invest in search. A large percentage of transactions is initiated by search queries. You are correct that fuzzy matching will likely get you decent results. However, finding the right product 90% of the time or 98% of the time makes a huge difference if you have a high volume of transactions. Synonyms and a better spelling model can massively improve your results and the resulting conversion.

But search relevancy is only one part of the equation. Think about a physical store and how the milk is usually in the back and a few high margin items are close to the counter or strategically placed. The same can be true for an ecommerce store. If the search engine has the ability to take business metrics like revenue and margins, or customer data like loyalty programs or brand affinity into account, you can much better optimise for your desired business outcome.

We just recently switched one of the largest ecommerce retailers in Australia over from Algolia to Sajari by doing the above and increasing their conversion rate by 10%.