Cloud Promotions

This is an overview capturing high level journey that i experienced during this project. I can dive deep into different sections if required on need to know basis.

 At Atlassian, being part of the Marketplace design team, I’m responsible for the pricing and packaging experience of apps. This was my second project under the same theme, how can we provide pricing flexibility via promotion tools. This is still an ongoing project expected to go live in Feb 2021 (development in progress).

We have a Triad setup and I am the gatekeeper and voice to make sure everything with respect to the user experience is in place. A little bit of context before I dive into this project.

Context

There are two types of users at play in Marketplace. Partners on the supply side and customers on the demand side.

Marketplace Partners are allowed to create promotions for apps. Whereby customers/solution partners can purchase apps at a discount. Currently, promotions can only be created for Server and Data Center apps in Marketplace.

Problem

The goal of this project is to enable our marketplace partners to create promotions for their apps hosted on Cloud.

It is extremely important for us to provide this flexibility to partners to run promotions. These promotions can be used to provide discounts to customers which will help in

• Incentivizing new and existing cloud customers to install more apps

• Controlling steep increase in the cost of apps while migrating from Server to Cloud

measure of success

Adoption of promo codes, percentage of order with promo code applied.

Details that are usually tagged to promotion:

• Promotion Campaign name

• promotion validity

• discount percentage

  • Flat

  • Tier specific discount

• Subscription type eligible

  • Annual

  • Monthly

• Applies to which situation?

  • All

  • New

  • Renewals

  • Upgrade

• How many uses remaining ( if its a shared promo code)

• Billing cycles valid

• How many uses remaining

• Eligible apps

Understanding the customer

The research was done by interviewing large marketplace partners (19 of them over the span of 3 weeks). This helped me understand them better also helped me get a better domain understanding in a short time. Me and my colleague were conducting these interviews with different Large marketplace partner. Sometimes I was driving the interview and sometimes I was an observer. We took turns.

The research goal was to understand the overall partner journey in Marketplace and find out shorter and long-term expectations for the partners. The insights with long term impact fed the envisioning activity that is running parallel to this track to define the overall Atlassian marketplace vision. Out of different short-term requirements, the need for cloud promotions stood out to be the most prominent one. On Probing the partners, Partner who creates a promo code created for the following reasons

Reasons for creating promo codes.

• When customers ran into support issue with the app partner (for compensating bad customer experience they are given discounts)

• Provided to participants of Dev summit/events to honor participant exclusivity

• As an incentive to attract solutions partner tie-ups

• To provide incentives via app bundles use cases

  • To get a full suite of apps from the partner

  • To cross-promote companion apps with main apps

  • Install all apps for one product base

• Sell annual subscriptions more than monthly promotions

• Solution partners need to demo the app to different potential customers. They need access tokens which are provided via 100% discounts.

• Incentivize upgrade or New subscriptions or Renewals specifically

• Relaxing price for a pandemic situation

Challenges

Promotion creation was fairly simple since partners were already familiar with the concept for server and DC apps. The promotion redemption flow for customer admins is a new concept. There were significant differences in how the cloud apps operate in comparison to server and DC. For instance, When a customer admin wants to buy a cloud app, there is no shopping cart experience like Server and DC apps. This means the promotion link (that already existed) cannot be used for cloud apps. So new touch-points had to be figured for promo redemption.

Promo Creation

For promo creation, I designed a wizard flow to generate the codes based on the partner provided information. You can find the key screens designed here. Once the promo code is created the same is shared with the customer admin via High touch flow. In this documentation, I am not capturing different design exploration done.

You can see the key screens below.

Promo Redemption

Solutioning happened at multiple levels completely remote with my product counterparts. We used a Mural for whiteboarding and to discuss. I identified some of the key scenarios that are crucial for the experience when the customer admin will be redeeming the promo code.

Once the solution and flow became concrete, I made prototypes to validate with multiple stakeholders. You can find the flow below. There is a user validation session planned with a limited set of partners (Focus group kind of session).

To follow the customer admins promo redemption , Click the button below to view prototype. For best viewing experience use a desktop browser.

NExt steps

The development is almost done and the content review is expected to be done soon. Different ideas that came during the ideation are phased out based on the tech constraints and overall business strategy. After the user validation and testing, there will be finance testing. Instrumentation is in place to capture different success measures and other user behavior related questions.With the collective feedback and new ideas, there will be continuous iteration to make this experience better.

<Impact will be updated soon. >