Compass, Atlassian
2024
Summary
As a Product Designer on the Atlassian Compass team, I spearheaded the design and successful internal adoption of the new Software Goals feature. This initiative fundamentally transformed how engineering improvement efforts were managed across Atlassian, providing teams with a clear, trackable framework to define objectives and measure progress. The robust internal uptake - evidenced by 276 engaged teams, a 57.9% conversion rate (from feature awareness to engagement), and a 2.5x lift in Health Details views - validated Software Goals as a powerful solution for operationalising software health. This significant internal success paved the way for its strategic external rollout.
Role
Product Designer
Team
Product Manager, Engineering Manager, 12 Developers
Problem
Compass serves as a critical catalog for software components (such as micro services and libraries), central to an engineering ecosystem. Within Atlassian, our dedicated Engineering Health team faced significant challenges in systematically improving the health and quality of these components. The existing process was largely manual and fragmented, characterised by:
Inconsistent Progress Tracking: No standardised or unified way for diverse teams to define, track, or report on their engineering improvement initiatives.
Limited Stakeholder Visibility: Key internal stakeholders (e.g., leadership, non-technical product managers) lacked a consolidated, real-time view of software health improvements across the organisation, relying on ad-hoc reports.
Operational Inefficiencies: Manual data collection and fragmented efforts made it challenging to drive consistent health improvements at scale.
Crucially, this internal struggle highlighted a widely acknowledged need: external customers of Compass had expressed similar pain points around managing and reporting on software health within their own organisations. Solving this internal challenge offered a direct path to addressing a significant market need.
Solution
To address these critical challenges and operationalise software health, we designed and implemented the Software Goals feature within Compass, providing a unified framework that empowered both central oversight and individual team autonomy:
Centralised Goal Definition & Visibility: We enabled the internal Engineering Health team to define and publish standardised Software Goals directly within Compass. Key metrics relevant to these goals were automatically tracked from various data sources. For external stakeholders who didn't regularly use Compass, progress summaries were elegantly surfaced via Atlassian Home, ensuring transparent, real-time visibility into the health of Atlassian’s software components, replacing fragmented reporting.
Team-Level Progress Tracking & Accountability: Development teams, in turn, gained the ability to directly monitor their progress against these defined goals within Compass. We designed intuitive workflows for teams to track their contributions, understand their current health status, and, importantly, request exemptions with clear justification when necessary. This fostered a shared system that balanced accountability with essential flexibility for unique team contexts.
Our design focused on creating a seamless experience that integrated directly into engineers' existing workflows, reducing friction and making health initiatives a natural part of their component management.
