Atlassian
A company that sells workflow tools — whose own teams still lost hours to manual work.
I led UX for EZMake, the MVP of Atlassian’s internal automation platform — a concept-and-discovery engagement to reimagine how employees build automations. The problem was fragmentation: a portfolio of automation tools so sprawling that shipping one automation could mean passing through ten or more separate tools and touchpoints.
Powerful tools almost nobody could get through.
The internal automation platform was capable — and barely used. The baseline I designed against told the story: adoption sat under one percent of the workforce, the road from first login to a first working automation averaged four months, and most people never made it there at all. The tools existed; the paththrough them didn’t.
These are the platform’s baseline figures — the problem I was designing against, not an outcome my work produced.
Twenty interviews, three archetypes, one journey.
I grounded the work in around twenty existing customer interviews rather than starting from a blank page, and derived three archetypes across one end-to-end journey — Discover, Onboard, First Touch, Build & Operate. The person I kept at the center was the citizen developer: capable, motivated, but not an engineer.
Consumers
Use automations others build — the largest, most-underserved group.
Builders
Citizen developers, app admins, and engineers — a spectrum, not one persona.
Champions
The advocates who spread automation across their teams.
Not another tool — a way through all of them.
EZMake framed itself as a layer on top of the tool sprawl — a single hub built on three moves that carried someone from blank page to shipped automation:
Decision framework
Points you at the right tool for the job — so the sprawl becomes a choice, not a maze.
Starter templates
Skip the blank page and start from a working shape you can adapt.
Ship-with-confidence checklist
Carries the last mile — the checks that turn a draft into something you trust in production.
I turned the research into user flows and Figma prototypes — landing, first-use, and onboarding screens — so an abstract strategy became something a stakeholder could actually click.
Keeping one user central across three squads.
The work ran across three squads with different mandates, each pulling toward its own users. Most of the job was facilitation — keeping the citizen developer central when it would have been easy to design for the engineers who were already the platform’s loudest, most-served voice. At the earliest phase, design is strategy made concrete.
At the earliest phase of a product, design is strategy made concrete.
The engagement produced the concept and discovery layer — archetypes, an end-to-end journey, user flows, and Figma prototypes of the EZMake hub — that reframed a pile of disconnected tools as a single, navigable path built around the person the old platform had left out.
This was a concept & discovery phase: the platform’s improvement goals (halving ramp time, growing to a thousand active builders) are targets, not results my work achieved — and some internal specifics are held back here pending a shareability check.