CUSTOMER STORIES
Learn how we augmented Atlassian's engineering team to enable faster delivery and improve customer satisfaction
SERVICES
Cloud, Java, Spring, Kotlin
Senior Engineering Manager
Atlassian is a world leader in developer tooling and workflow software. Their products are used by countless organisations to manage software delivery, to enable better collaboration across teams, and to business critical functions.
In 2018, Atlassian engaged Instil to help accelerate delivery across multiple Data Center product lines. They needed additional engineering capacity but required a partner who could seamlessly integrate into existing teams, maintain high standards of quality, and contribute meaningfully to product outcomes.
Why Instil?
The decision to work with Instil was based on three key factors:
Reputation for quality and technical excellence in software engineering.
Flexibility in engagement, with the ability to scale team size and timings.
Cultural fit, ensuring smooth integration into existing team structures.
Scope of work
Instil engineers were required to be fully embedded into the client’s development processes. As such, they were treated as part of the internal team and expected to participate in every stage of the product lifecycle, including:
Feature kickoffs and scope definition.
Risk management and feasibility analysis.
Build, test, and release cycles.
Community communication and customer success tracking.
Post-release measurement of success metrics.
Approach
Instil engineers adopted the client’s internal Agile practices, engaging directly with cross-functional teams to manage dependencies and maintain alignment. We worked with the same collaboration tools - Jira Software, Confluence, Atlas, and Slack - and quickly became indistinguishable from the client’s full-time employees.
Our proactive approach, responsiveness, and ability to ask the right questions at the right time, helped accelerate delivery and reduce risk.
Key deliverables
Over the course of the engagement, 10 engineers from Instil worked on the project, ranging from Developers to Senior Developers and Principal Developers. The team were responsible for:
Delivery of new features across multiple developer tooling products.
Active participation in scoping sessions to improve risk management and feature prioritisation.
Contribution to a modern Java-based tech stack, including Java, Spring, OSGi, Tomcat, JUnit, Git, and JavaScript.
Impact
The collaboration delivered measurable business impact:
High-quality, high-performance deliverables across multiple products.
Faster time-to-value, enabling more features to reach customers quickly.
An increase in CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) scores, leading to uplifts in revenue and renewals as a lagging indicator.
The ability of Instil’s team to integrate seamlessly, ramp quickly on the tech stack, and deliver with consistency ensured that the client could expand engineering capacity without compromising standards.
What impressed the client
The client highlighted two standout qualities:
Seamless integration into the internal team’s ways of working, indistinguishable from full-time employees.
Technical excellence, with engineers ramping quickly on product challenges and becoming effective contributors from the start.