Five Core Principles to Build a Thriving Developer Platform

The Atlassian Ecosystem, which encompasses the Marketplace and developer platform, stands as one of the largest in the B2B software sector. In short, Atlassian customers benefit from access to over 1,800 third-party vendors and partners, within a Marketplace that features more than 5,700 apps and integrations. Notably, teams install approximately 20,000 apps every week from this Marketplace. In early 2024, the Atlassian Marketplace announced that it had exceeded $4 billion in lifetime sales.

These apps connect Atlassian products with other tools that our customers use, enhance existing features and add new ones as well. He

Building a thriving and vibrant ecosystem has been a lengthy journey. In this post, I will share some of the key lessons and principles that the product team have adhered to along the way.

Customer First

When developing a platform for developers, you primarily engage with two key personas: the developers who create applications and the Atlassian customers who use these applications. This dynamic forms a two-sided marketplace, where both customers and partners play critical roles in driving success.

While much of our day-to-day collaboration may be with developers, our guiding principle remains clear—customer obsession. Our platform and its applications ultimately exist to serve Atlassian customers, and their needs must be at the forefront of our decisions.

In most instances, the needs of these two personas will align. However, there are occasions when you must prioritise one over the other, and having a clear guiding principle is essential. For instance, we recently announced a feature that allows customers to easily identify apps that do not transfer data outside of Atlassian and that utilise data residency-enabled storage. You can find more details about this feature here: https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/marketplace/runs-on-atlassian/.

While this feature was not the highest priority for our developer community, we recognised that its absence was hindering customer adoption of apps. By moving forward with its implementation while also educating and supporting our partner community, we ensured a win-win outcome—enhancing customer trust while continuing to foster a strong developer ecosystem.

Collaborating with the developer community

One of the key benefits of working in this space is that the developers who build on your platform are very invested in your success and are happy to give you a generous amount of time to help improve the platform. This is something you should absolutely take advantage of - we do this in several ways

• RFCs for proposed features: Since it’s quite difficult to modify platform features and APIs once they are released, we invest a considerable amount of time upfront in getting early feedback and ensuring that we build them right. One of the best examples of this are the RFCs that we post in the developer community forum. We post detailed proposals which include designs and milestones and our community gives us feedback to help make the proposed features better.
• Virtual and in person Events: While we connect regularly with our developer community using Slack, Zoom, and other collaboration tools, there is immense value in face to face events. We recently held our annual developer conference (Atlas Camp) in Brussels - this was attended by over 300 partners and we are able to interact with them and get candid feedback.
• Partner advisory council: We have a select group of partners who sit on an advisory council that give us candid and detailed feedback on a variety of topics. Our discussions, held every month, encompass a wide range of subjects, from high-level strategic shifts to the finer details of specific features.

Thinking long term

Building a developer platform is a slow burn. Unlike user-facing products, where A/B testing can be employed for quick adoption and rapid adjustments, developing a platform demands a steadfast commitment to the vision and a long-term strategy. It is crucial to approach success metrics and planning cycles with a different mindset.

This challenge is compounded in an environment where immediate results are often anticipated. Most product companies expect that every feature has a defined success metric to ensure it effectively addresses the problem it was designed to solve. For a product feature, a success metric can be met in a few weeks but for a platform it may take an entire quarter before an app utilizing a platform feature is released on our marketplace and subsequently adopted by customers. While we try to have early measures of success such as output metrics, developer adoption etc, we also invest time in educating and aligning the broader organisation on the unique rituals and processes necessary for the platform's success.

Transparency with the developer community

Transparency is critical in building trust with our developer community. This means proactively sharing high-level strategy shifts, providing early notice of changes like redesigns or API deprecations, and ensuring developers have the information they need to plan effectively.

Transparency also extends towards the communication of less favourable news to the community. For e.g. while we try to avoid replicating functionality that apps offer, there are instances where this becomes unavoidable due to shifting customer expectations regarding the core product offerings. How do we deal with such instances without significantly eroding developer trust?

• Whenever feasible, we share our roadmaps in advance and let them know areas of focus and areas where we do not plan to invest. However, this isn't always a foolproof measure as priorities and areas of focus can change.
• When the unavoidable happens, we are honest with the developers community on what we’re building and why. We often commit to building product APIs to enable apps to be built to extend these features further.

Evangelising a Platform first mindset within the company

Another crucial element for success is for product teams to prioritise the platform during the development process, rather than treating it as an afterthought. It is all too common for products to overlook the impact of changes made to features or APIs, which can significantly affect the apps and extensions built upon them.

Consistently collaborating with the product team and promoting the advantages of the ecosystem can yield substantial benefits. For instance, Atlassian recently introduced Rovo, our suite of AI features. This initiative represents one of our most significant investments, and what stands out is that it was designed with extensibility as a primary focus. We launched the feature alongside third-party Rovo agents.

One of the key methods for promoting our platform and gathering valuable feedback is through dogfooding. With over 5,000 engineers at Atlassian, we prioritize exposing them to our platform.

• Atlassian hosts several internal hackathons, such as Ship It! and Innovation Week, where engineers are encouraged to work on features of their choice. We offer a special category of prizes for features developed on the platform to stimulate participation.
• We invest in platform capabilities to facilitate the development of features by product teams on the developer platform.

Final Thoughts

Building a thriving developer platform is a long and challenging venture but highly rewarding as well. I hope you find this article beneficial. Please share your feedback and comments.

🤝 If you're a product manager who interested in working on challenging initiatives such as this one, please leave your details here https://join.atlassian.com/event-21557/talentcommunity/form