Guiding Design Vision for Confluence AI Strategy
Our vision showcased an extensive array of innovative AI features across the content discovery and creation spectrum.
Challenge
As the Senior Design Manager for Confluence, I led the design team responsible for creating a product vision for Confluence/Work Management AI from July 2023 to July 2024. In a rapidly evolving AI landscape with changing company priorities, we needed to define a compelling visual and experiential direction to strengthen Confluence’s position against competitors like Notion, reduce user churn, and drive enterprise expansion.
Context
Time Frame: 5-month initiative (November 2023 - March 2024)
Team Composition: Cross-functional collaboration between Design (my team), Product Management, Product Marketing, Content Design, and Engineering
Strategic Importance: This vision would define how Confluence incorporated AI to address critical user pain points around content discovery and creation
Business Impact: The project would directly influence Confluence’s 3-year revenue strategy and enterprise expansion efforts
Leadership Approach
Building and Managing a Resilient Design Team
When our original Lead Product Designer had to return to another project, I ensured our design direction remained consistent even as team composition shifted. I pulled in our Lead Content Designer, carefully balancing competing priorities, and ensuring continuity despite team transitions.
This staffing choice perfectly positioned us to address Confluence’s core content discovery and creation challenges. Unlike purely visual design approaches, our content-first mindset ensured we focused on the underlying information architecture and user flow rather than just surface-level aesthetics. This perspective was particularly valuable in AI development, where understanding content relationships, taxonomies, and user context is essential for creating intelligent features that genuinely enhance productivity.
We naturally prioritized features that would transform how users interact with information—from Smart Answers that provide contextual summaries to Content Transmutation that moves ideas fluidly between formats. The narrative user journey we created resonated deeply with stakeholders precisely because it demonstrated how AI would solve real content problems users face daily.
Creating a Structure for Visionary Design Thinking
As a team, we implemented a “hero’s journey” framework for the project, breaking it into six distinct phases:
The Call to Adventure: Creating a temporary Slack channel and facilitating initial kickoff sessions
Crossing the First Threshold: Hosting visioning workshops to understand design flows and narratives
The Approach: Pivoting our vision to focus on three key pillars: Content Transmutation, Visually Appealing Confluence, and AI Agents
The Ordeal: Navigating ambiguity around Atlassian’s Central AI strategy while maintaining design progress
The Reward: Iterating on feedback to produce a compelling experience showcasing AI’s potential
Return with the Elixir: Successfully presenting our vision to Work Management leadership
Translating Strategic Direction into Tangible Experiences Through Collaborative Storytelling
Working in lockstep with Product Marketing and Product Management, we created design artifacts that not only showcased visual solutions but told a comprehensive story about how AI would transform the Confluence experience:
A narrative-driven user journey for a fictional company developed collaboratively with Product Marketing and Content Design, showing end-to-end AI experiences through the eyes of both a Marketing Manager and Product Manager.
Detailed Bento box walkthroughs demonstrating specific AI features in action, aligned with Product Management’s strategic pillars
Visual concepts that made abstract AI capabilities concrete and compelling, providing Sales and Marketing with tangible examples for customer conversations
Detailed principles and definitions for how AI Agents would work in Confluence, creating shared language across teams
Content Discovery and Consumption Features
Page Catch Up: Providing users with brief page overviews, updates on latest changes, and summarized comment themes
Space Summary Blocks: AI-generated overviews summarizing all work and strategy in a space, updating automatically as content changes
Smart Answers: Creating tailored "pre-reads" for different stakeholders drawn from pages, views, comments, and integrated Slack messages
Quick Summary: Generating concise page summaries with high-quality outputs (achieved 78% positive feedback)
Summarize in Feed: Bringing summaries directly into content feeds to improve discovery and engagement
Comments Summary: Intelligently summarizing inline comments to provide quick context
Content Creation and Transformation Features
AI Chat for Content Generation: Helping gather existing work, identify themes, and create consolidated documentation
Synced Whiteboards: Automatically generating and updating architectural diagrams from text selections
Template Intelligence: Suggesting personalized templates based on users' past content and offering contextual questions to guide creation
One-Click Page Polish: Enhancing content with writing suggestions, illustrations, formatting improvements, and visual elements
Generative Illustrations: Creating custom imagery to support key messaging
Whiteboard AI: Consolidating, de-duping, grouping, and summarizing collaborative inputs
Content Transmutation: Converting whiteboard content into structured Jira tickets and other formats
Smart Link AI: Generating summaries and importing content from third-party services like Figma and Google Docs
Automated Documentation: Creating FAQs and support documentation from existing project information
Database Automation: Building databases with automated page creation for training materials and sales enablement
This collaborative approach ensured that design solutions were not only visually impressive but strategically sound and effectively communicable to stakeholders and customers.
Adapting to Strategic Shifts and Feedback
When feedback indicated our initial direction wasn’t ambitious enough, my product partner and I guided the team to “think bigger” and focus on differentiation over table stakes features. When a review shifted focus from experience to strategy, I quickly adjusted our approach to ensure we communicated strategic value while showcasing innovative design work.
Orchestrating Strategic Cross-Functional Collaboration
From the project’s inception, I established a genuinely integrated approach between Design, Product Management, and Product Marketing. This three-pronged collaboration was essential for success:
Design & Product Management: We worked closely with the Group Product Manager to ensure our design vision aligned with business objectives and technical feasibility, balancing innovation with practical execution
Design & Product Marketing: Our partnership with the Product Marketing Manager was crucial in crafting compelling narratives that communicated the value proposition effectively to stakeholders and future customers
Integrated Working Model: Rather than working in silos, we created shared accountability with clear role definition:
Product Management focused on the business case and opportunity sizing.
Design owned experience and visual storytelling.
Product Marketing developed messaging and go-to-market narratives.
Additionally, the team introduced “pair programming” sessions, in which team members from different functions collaborated in real time on vision narratives, resulting in more cohesive deliverables. I strongly supported this innovation and the approach proved particularly effective for accommodating neurodivergent team members and making progress on challenging strategic work.
Results & Measurable Impact
Our strategic design vision successfully guided execution, leading to…
Measurable Business Impact: The vision directly influenced execution, with team members delivering features that:
Generated 33% of ALL ATLASSIAN AI MAU through Confluence AI features
Achieved OKR milestones with 12.5% of opted-in AI MAU utilizing Confluence AI features
Improved Quick Summary positive feedback ratio by 5%
Decreased qualitative negative feedback by 6%
Boosted engagement with 9% more WAU using Quick Summary when exposed to Summarize in Feed
Enhanced comment engagement with +103% increase in comments summary events per user
Leadership Alignment: Secured executive buy-in for our AI strategy for FY24/25.
Strategic Framework: Created visual artifacts that translated complex concepts into tangible user experiences.
Wall Street Recognition: Analysts attributed increases in TEAM share value to our AI offerings, directly connecting our design vision to shareholder value.
Executive Acknowledgment: Received specific praise for Team’24 contributions.
Key Leadership Lessons
Executive Sponsorship is Critical
Leadership bottlenecks and involvement at different timeframes proved challenging. Defining a clear decision-maker and sponsor from the start, who fully understands the scope and expectations, is essential to avoid last-minute directional changes.
Creative Exploration Must Balance with Strategic Alignment
Our team’s ability to explore and visualize diverse ideas enabled us to identify realistic yet exciting features. Balancing creative freedom with strategic alignment allowed us to develop concepts that were innovative but tied to the overall company direction.
Strategic Partnership Between Design, Product Management, and Product Marketing Drives Success
Including Product Marketing as a core partner alongside Product Management from day one was transformative. This tripartite collaboration ensured we created beautiful designs and a comprehensive vision with a straightforward strategic narrative and compelling go-to-market positioning. Product Marketing’s early involvement meant that our design solutions were already aligned with how the product would be positioned and communicated to customers, creating a seamless connection between the user experience we designed and the value proposition we would ultimately deliver to the market.
Design Leadership Requires Both Structure and Flexibility
It was crucial to create a framework for the design process while remaining adaptable to changing priorities. The journey’s structure helped maintain momentum while allowing for necessary pivots.
Innovative Collaboration Methods Improve Results
The “pair programming” approach to strategic design work proved highly effective. Adapting this engineering practice for design collaboration created focused, high-quality outputs and reduced the isolation often felt during complex strategic work.
Personal Reflection
By establishing a transparent process while adapting to changing circumstances, we translated complex strategic directions into compelling user experiences that addressed real business challenges. The impressive metrics from features like Quick Summary, Summarize in Feed, and Comments Summary demonstrate how our strategic vision effectively guided execution and delivered real business value.
What made this particularly rewarding was seeing how our “hero’s journey” framework helped designers execute with clarity and confidence despite the challenging AI landscape.
This experience strengthened my conviction that design leadership must balance strategic vision with practical execution guidance and that early cross-functional collaboration between Design, Product Management, and Product Marketing is essential for translating vision into impact.