Making Onboarding
a Growth Engine
How I led content strategy for Jira and Confluence new-user onboarding — rethinking the first-run experience to drive retention, conversion, and long-term product love.
New users were showing up — and leaving
Jira and Confluence are powerful tools. But for new users, that power often felt like friction. The first-run experience wasn't meeting people where they were — it assumed too much, explained too little, and left users without a clear reason to come back.
The growth team's challenge was clear: turn more new sign-ups into active, returning users, and eventually, paying customers.
Content as the onboarding experience
I didn't treat content as a layer on top of the design — I treated it as the experience itself. Every tooltip, empty state, CTA, and onboarding modal was a moment to orient a new user, build confidence, and create momentum toward their first meaningful action.
Qualitative research & friction mapping
Initiated user research to surface where new users were getting stuck, confused, or dropping off in the first week.
Hypothesis-driven experimentation
Turned research findings into testable content hypotheses — shipping 50+ experiments per year alongside designers, PMs, and engineers.
Upgrade & monetization content
Built the content strategy for AI feature upsells and premium-tier education — designing flows that converted free users to paid plans without feeling pushy.
Executive storytelling
Regularly presented experiment insights and content strategy recommendations to executive leadership, making content visible as a growth lever.
"The best onboarding doesn't feel like onboarding — it feels like the product already understands you."
20% more users came back. 35,000 converted.
The content strategy drove a 20% lift in day 1–6 return rate — a signal that users were finding enough value in the first experience to come back for more. On the conversion side, the work contributed to 35,000 first-full-purchase conversions on Jira Software.
Beyond the metrics, the work established content design as a core part of Atlassian's growth motion — not a finishing step, but a strategic input from the beginning.