Atlassian + Udemy
Atlassian supercharges what we're doing because of the collaboration it enables.
Stephanie Wisdom
Senior Director of Customer and Content Marketing
~2400
Hours of meeting time saved each year on OKR tracking alone
1,500+
Employees connected with one work management solution
About Udemy
Udemy transforms lives through learning by ensuring everyone has access to the latest and most relevant skills. Through the Udemy Intelligent Skills Platform and a global community of diverse and knowledgeable instructors, millions of learners gain expertise in a wide range of technical and professional skills.
Industry
Internet and Software
Location
San Francisco, CA
Number of users
1,100 Jira users
1,900 Confluence users
40 Jira Service Management agents
80 users in Loom
Company size
1,500
Udemy unlocks collaboration and saves 2,400 hours/year by unifying with Atlassian
Challenge: Udemy, one of the most popular online learning platforms in the world, grew 4x in three years. This rapid expansion hindered collaboration, alignment, visibility, and efficiency.
Solution: Udemy unified teams across the business and overcame their growing pains by centralizing with Atlassian cloud tools.
Impact: Connecting tech and business departments in Atlassian has unlocked collaboration and visibility, helping teams work in tandem to deliver more value, faster.
The growing pains of scaling spark the need for a new solution
Shawn Kresal spent years climbing the ranks in government organizations and financial service firms, but he yearned to get back to his technology roots and work with a more exciting, innovative organization. He had a background in computer science but was feeling rusty, so he turned to Udemy online courses to brush up on different programming languages (along with piano lessons just for fun).
Through Udemy, Shawn not only rediscovered his love for learning but also a company with a mission he believed in: making learning more accessible to everyone in the world. Coincidentally, Udemy was hiring its first technical program manager—exactly the type of role Shawn was looking for. It was meant to be.
After Shawn joined Udemy in 2019, the company grew exponentially within several years, fueled by the rise in e-learning during the pandemic (sourdough bread-making, anyone?) and an increasingly competitive job market. This rapid expansion forced Udemy to scale its team and infrastructure. This helped Udemy keep pace with the needs of learners and the rate of innovation but also created new challenges with alignment, visibility, collaboration, and efficiency.
To solve these common scaling pains while continuing to deliver on their vision to make learning more accessible, Udemy centralized teams across the organization with Atlassian cloud tools, creating a new hub for teamwork that has helped the business scale and succeed.
When you need something in most companies, you email, you make a phone call, you send 1,800 Slack messages. Here, all that is gone. It’s all done through Atlassian.”
Shawn Kresal
Senior Director, Technical Program Management and Chief of Staff, CTO
Amid rapid growth, the old ways of working weren’t, well, working
By 2023, Udemy’s workforce had quadrupled in size in about three years, and their old ways of working started to crack.
“When we were a small company, everybody was doing their own thing, and it was an accelerator. We didn't need to scale up, we needed to move quickly,” Shawn recalls. “But today, our engineering department is bigger than the whole company was a few years ago. Now, everybody doing their own thing is a huge decelerator.”
As leadership started working closely with product and engineering teams, they were asking seemingly simple questions:
“What’s everyone working on?”
“What’s the latest status of our top 3 projects?”
“What teams do we need to pull in to move forward?”
While these questions appeared basic, they were hard to answer quickly. “There was no way to get that visibility,” Shawn explains. “We could have a fairly expensive meeting with 30 people or have a dozen people go to Slack, followed by another 50 people doing the research. But when one team is in Asana and another team is in Google Sheets and another team puts everything in the wiki, there’s no way to get that information in a systematic, scalable way.”
Using Atlassian is paying dividends with time and clarity…Before we had to attend a bunch of meetings, Slack many people, or read through several channels. Now you can go into Atlassian as your one-stop shop and find whatever you need.”
Shawn Kresal
Senior Director, Technical Program Management and Chief of Staff, CTO
Unifying Udemy with one system of work powered by Atlassian cloud tools
Shawn and leadership agreed that the solution to Udemy’s growing pains was centralizing their people, processes, and platform. “We agreed to unify with Atlassian,” Shawn recalls. “It's lightweight. It's fast. It meets people where they're working. And it also gives our partners a lot of visibility.”
Udemy’s culture embraces experimenting and iterating, so, fortunately, teams were open to change. “They understood that if everybody's doing it, that will be a great thing for us,” Shawn says.
Shawn’s team helped connect the entire organization and build a system of work with Atlassian tools. All Udemy employees now use Confluence Cloud Premium as their collaborative workspace and a single source of truth. Product and engineering rely on Jira Cloud Enterprise to collaborate with non-technical stakeholders as they develop and maintain Udemy’s products. IT developers also use Jira to manage business applications across the company.
“When you need something in most companies, you email, you make a phone call, you send 1,800 Slack messages,” Shawn explains. “Here, all that is gone. It’s all done through Atlassian.”
He adds that cross-team collaboration has become infinitely easier now that everyone is unified on one platform. “If someone needs four teams involved in a project, you just tag them. Then those teams come together and tag their engineer, designer, or researcher.”
Teams still have the autonomy to choose their ways of working, but everyone is required to track their objectives and roadmap items in Jira and Confluence for centralized reporting. This has improved visibility and accountability while saving significant time.
“We track all of our technical projects, their progress, and OKR summaries through Confluence. That has eliminated about 500-600 person-hours of meeting time,” Shawn says. “We used to have a long meeting with 80 people every quarter, which was tremendously expensive. So then we said, ‘Let’s embrace our courageously experimental mindset and cancel all of those meetings for a quarter.’ We've essentially automated that entire process with a handful of custom fields in Jira and reporting in Confluence, which is incredible to me. Everybody said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is fantastic!’”
Unifying with the Atlassian cloud platform has also helped save time and mental load when new people join the company and when project teams change. “Our engineering department is 400+ people on any given day. One person might be on four or five project teams, which come and go. How do you keep up with that? Now there's a central place. Whenever a new team is spun up, they just Slack me, and I take one minute to add the new team,” Shawn says. “We were starting to weigh ourselves down with our team size before. Now with Atlassian, we have an incredibly lightweight process.”
We used to have a long meeting with 80 people every quarter, which was tremendously expensive…We've essentially automated that entire process with a handful of custom fields in Jira and reporting in Confluence.”
Shawn Kresal
Senior Director, Technical Program Management and Chief of Staff, CTO
Marketing joins the movement for visibility and accountability
CMO Genefa Murphy, PhD, adds that bringing Udemy’s people together with Jira, Confluence, and Loom has been a game-changer for both technical and business teams.
“Having a central place for everyone to get information, draft content, and get feedback has been invaluable. We can interact with our product teams through Jira, but even if you don’t have access, you can still see what you need with Jira filters and dashboards that pull through to Confluence. That’s been huge for improving visibility and driving accountability. Some of our team members have also been using Loom videos to scale information sharing and provide a way for people to go back and reference it whenever they need.”
“We got great feedback from marketing,” Shawn adds. “How many people do they have to ask to see the entire engineering roadmap or a dashboard of current projects? None. They can self-serve. That’s been huge to unblock our marketing folks and give them more visibility.”
Experimentation leads to optimization
True to their experimental culture, Udemy frequently tests the latest Atlassian features and tools. They enrolled in the early access program for Company Hub, which allows them to customize Confluence with their own brand colors, images, visual cards, links, and more. “A wiki page is usually pretty static, but with Company Hub, it's more like a magazine or a modern web page. I'm excited to see more!” Shawn says.
Team members across the company are also using Atlassian Intelligence to save time and mental load. Shawn says, “The Atlassian Intelligence search is fantastic. It’s been great for helping us find specific information, especially with thousands and thousands of pages to comb through. People love definitions, too. They’re especially helpful because we have a separate internal dictionary for Udemy terms and industry language that new hires might not know. Now, users can just click on the term to learn what it means.”
Unlocking potential for Udemy’s customers and colleagues
While Udemy is busy making learning more accessible for their customers, they’ve also been busy making collaboration and information more accessible with their Atlassian solution.
“Using Atlassian is paying dividends with time and clarity. Nothing is going to slow down your teams more than a lack of clarity,” Shawn says. “Before we had to attend a bunch of meetings, Slack many people, or read through several channels. It was very expensive to get any information. Now you can go into Atlassian as your one-stop shop and find whatever you need.”
Genefa is seeing the difference in marketing, too. “At the core, our teams want to align, amplify, and accelerate Udemy’s work. Atlassian helps us do that. It aligns our teams by providing a clear and concise way for people to communicate and engage with one another. It enables us to amplify the work that is being done by providing a central place for everyone to go, which allows us to scale. In turn, that allows us to accelerate, because instead of us having to wait for somebody to reply or for a meeting to happen, we can just have instant communication and exchange within the platform.” Genefa’s colleague, Senior Director of Customer and Content Marketing Stephanie Wisdom, adds, “Atlassian supercharges what we're doing because of the collaboration it enables.”
As Udemy invests in further growth, having a centralized, AI-powered platform for collaboration will continue to pay dividends. Their company believes that “skills are the key to unlocking potential,” and by transforming teamwork with Atlassian, employees are unlocking their potential too.
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