It’s that time of year again when we prepare to send out our bi-annual partner & developer sentiment survey. I hear your collective sigh at the thought of an email survey hitting your inbox, but I’m here to reassure you of the tremendous value that your responses bring to helping myself, the researchers, and the rest of the ecosystem/partner teams in informing decisions in your interests. Since our survey in May, we’ve been busy reviewing responses, connecting feedback to the right teams, and committing to changes based on this feedback.

Keep reading to find out those key feedback themes and actions that resulted.

At Atlassian, we know that our developer and partner community engages with Atlassian across different capacities, from building an app on our platform to selling an app on the Marketplace as a partner. As we improve on our ways of collaborating with you and your overall experience with Atlassian, we continue to ask for your feedback as part of our bi-annual Atlassian Experience Survey, with our next iteration launching on October 11th.

Results from the last survey

Overall, the survey received 360 responses from Atlassian developers, Marketplace Partners, and Solution Partners. The findings reported Marketplace partner sentiment saw an upward shift in Marketplace Partner sentiment and a downward shift in overall developer sentiment. Despite the majority of developer tooling satisfaction trending upward, we know that there’s more work to be done.

Who did we survey & who is a developer

We know how annoying surveys can be, so we aim to reduce the number of unnecessary contacts from Atlassian and streamline our process by sending one survey to all partners twice a year. This means that the survey goes to many different kinds of partners, including Solution, Marketplace, and developers (who may or may not function within a partner organisation).

We ask that you self-identify your group at the start of the survey so we can show you only relevant questions. Self-identifying as a developer in this survey is defined “I develop apps and integrations for Atlassian products”.

Our focus remains to unlock the potential of our customers in Cloud and support our developers and partners alike with a partnership they can trust – with stability in our platform, reliability in support, and resources to drive the growth and demand of your apps, customizations, and businesses on the Marketplace.

We know that your experience and ability to work with Atlassian is critical to app growth success on the Atlassian Marketplace. We continue to focus on providing value in the developer platform, the partner program and opportunities to support app discoverability for customers. Earlier this year, we made a commitment to making improvements in stability and reliability, support, and communications to ultimately turn your feedback into action, and we continue to make improve these areas to support your experience:

  • Timely response and support from Atlassian: The survey findings suggest the Developer Community is a source of support for peers to help one another through common challenges, particularly when developers feel they can’t get timely support via Atlassian. We continue to support developers with improvements on how to get help and report critical incidents through a single instance, Developer & Marketplace support.
  • Stability & reliability of the platform: We know that developers and partners need a level of platform stability and reliability you can trust. While we strive to reduce the incident rate and severity, in an effort to provide more transparency, we recently published a few updates:
    • App incident severity levels These definitions are built for purpose with our developers and Marketplace Partners.
    • How to submit a critical incident This process defines how to report an issue, even if you are unsure of whether you’re experiencing a critical incident. The Developer Support team will review the reported issue and can update the ticket as needed – and if it’s not an incident they can move it to the right project.
    • How to check incident updates This process defines where to go for major and minor incident updates and the level of communication you can expect to see based on the severity of an incident.

In parallel to our incident management and support improvements, there is still work to be done to identify the root causes of the recurring incidents across our product and Marketplace platforms.,

  • Communications from Atlassian: We recognize that staying up to date with Atlassian announcements is critical to understanding how our changes may impact your ability to build apps and grow your business. We are focused on improving the quality of our communications, and providing clarification on the communication channels and where to find the resources to support you.

Although the sentiment scores are stable and in some cases improving (e.g., in terms of available APIs, extension points, UI features, and the Developer Community), we know that there is still work to be done.

Your feedback is important to give us insight and help make continuous improvements to your partner or developer experience. Our research team and I read every response and ensure appropriate feedback throughout Atlassian, and where possible, share back relevant data from the survey insights back in the Developer Community. All responses are confidential.

ℹ️ The next iteration of our Atlassian Experience Survey is coming on October 11th.

If you have ever logged into The Atlassian Developer Community AND you are opted in to receive product surveys (https://my.atlassian.com/email > scroll down to Product Surveys), this survey will land in your inbox on October 11th, with a reminder to be sent on October 19th.

Keen share your feedback in future research sessions and shape the future of Atlassian Partner & Developer experiences? Join the Atlassian Partner Research Group today! Learn more.

Partner and Developer Experience Survey: A readout and update