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Sorry to hear it's been a frustrating experience. I'm a PM for Confluence Cloud and we're always trying to make it better. Would you be willing to share more sp

Sorry to hear it's been a frustrating experience. I'm a PM for Confluence Cloud and we're always trying to make it better. Would you be willing to share more specifics, such as: - Pages with content X are the slowest - Trying to do A/B/C is annoyingly slow - etc ? (edit: looks like HN is severely limiting my reply rate so apologies for delays)

eitland 6y ago
Not GP but I also have the same feeling across Atlassian products: it is more like a general feeling all the time for many of us. I'm using the latest Firefox on Windows, a developer laptop with 32GB memory that was brand new this spring as well as 500/500 fiber.
- confluence_perf 6y ago
  Is this also on Cloud products? Right now on holiday (through Tuesday), but would like learn more. I see your contact info in your profile, if you give consent I'd like send you an email on Wednesday with some followup questions (the first question is "what is the URL for your cloud instance" so I don't want to be asking for it on a public forum) (edit: typo)
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    > Is this also on Cloud products? On my company's cloud instance of Jira, it's a minimum of a 2-3 second delay to do anything. Edit, wait a few seconds, save, wait a few seconds, change a field, wait a few seconds... and God help you if you need to reload the page because something got stuck.
burnthrow 6y ago
Come on, everything is slow and you know it.
- confluence_perf 6y ago
  We have certainly heard from some customers that agree that 'everything' is slow, but we've also heard from other customers saying they have no problems. We would love to fix "everything", and we have some longer term projects focused on this -> However, "everything" fixes seem to be a more incremental boost and also take longer time to complete. If you have any feedback about "specific" items that are the most frustrating, we'd love to hear about those -> targeted fixes for specific can be much faster, much greater gains, and usually offer better user experience gain/engineering time returns. If not, I can only say that we are definitely working on making 'everything faster' (edit: trying to reply but looks like HN is limiting my reply rate) (edit: maybe I can post my replies here and hopefully they'll get read) ------ @rusticpenn - This is definitely possible that 'some users are just used to it'. But we also see a very wide variance in individual customers' performance numbers (ie. some instances have consistently faster performance than other instances), and even within individual instances variance amongst users (some users have consistently faster experience than other users on the same instance) -> we're trying what we can to narrow down the causes in this variance. Hearing from "users with slow experiences" is simply one of the ways we're trying to track this down, but it helps if users are willing to provide more info. -------- @ratww - thank you for the suggestion! We have some amount of data that helps us see what might be different between instances, but haven't gone out of our way to 'interview a fast customer', I'll bring this up with the team to see. The two biggest factors I think we've seen: slow machines can contribute (but not a necessity), and large pages (especially with large tables, or large number of tables) can contribute.
  - rusticpenn 6y ago
    > but we've also heard from other customers saying they have no problems I am sorry, there are probably customers who are used to the tools. Maybe they don't pass the Mom test. That point comes out as unnecessary defense here.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      I think these maybe the same people calling Trump to say that he's a great president. Both claims are equally as unbelievable.
tw25613937 6y ago
Not trying to be snarky, but... do you use your product?
- grzm 6y ago
  These are questions I have as well. That said, creating a throwaway and prefacing a comment with "Not trying to be snarky" shouldn't be an excuse for not taking the time to couch questions in a way you're more confident aren't going to be interpreted in a negative way. This isn't directed just at you: I see this behavior all too often: people using throwaways as an excuse to not take the time to express things in a manner that doesn't need to apologize for itself. Atlassian employees use their products, and tips and tricks they may have to use them effectively, or make the experience of using JIRA or Confluence, or their other tools more enjoyable and useable would be great to know!
  - dylan604 6y ago
    If you need tips or TRICKS to make a product useable, you have a BAD product.
    - grzm 6y ago
      I agree, and I also know that you have to deal with the world as it is right now even while you work to make it better. If you have to use Jira or Confluence at work, you probably want to know how to make that as useful as possible. If you're working at Atlassian, you probably want to make your customer's experience as enjoyable as possible as soon as possible. Ideally you have a great product and great documentation and all happy customers. If that's not the case, you have an opportunity to work on a number of fronts, including improving documentation and the product, and help current customers with the product as it is. You can and should be doing all of these things. Piling on doesn't help anything.
      - hchz 6y ago
        Some people don't want to use it at all, and don't care for the situation that C-suite everywhere buys Atlassian's trash. They don't want minor improvements to help it limp along, they want to vent and complain about it. I think it's impossible that Atlassian evolves into a good product company, but it's entirely possible that my next CTO googled for opinions on the product, found a few discussions on HN with a combined 3,000 complaints about what a garbage fire it is, and went with Clubhouse.
snypher 6y ago
As a product manager, are you allowed to discuss performance and benchmarks without violation of your contract? Or, is it just customers that are prohibited from this?
hchz 6y ago
"My boss told me to generate a bunch of JIRAs in reaction to the recent accurate discussions on HN of how poor our performance is, so I need specific dit-dot issues to buff our team metrics rather than address the cause of the issues, which is a political non-starter"
- saagarjha 6y ago
  A more charitable interpretation might be “my boss won’t let me fix things unless I have specific comments about problems from people who use the software”.
  - jiggawatts 6y ago
    Translation: His boss is an idiot and their lunch is going to be eaten by a company where management gives a shit about product quality.
  - samb1729 6y ago
    If their boss doesn't let them just get to work without thoroughly documenting everything that's a larger problem. As good a time as any to start looking for jobs with bosses that don't suck.
- samb1729 6y ago
  There's nothing quite like having to spend a load of time justifying everything your team wants to do to the team above because they need to justify the things their teams need to do to the team above them. Sometimes things are just obviously crap to the people tasked with working on them and having to jump through these kind of hoops eventually leaves an organisation with only the kind of people who are happy to keep doing it. Nothing makes me stop ignoring recruiter messages quite like being asked to flesh out a JIRA ticket with technical details by a person who has literally no use for the details they ask me to write.

eitland 6y ago

Not GP but I also have the same feeling across Atlassian products: it is more like a general feeling all the time for many of us. I'm using the latest Firefox on Windows, a developer laptop with 32GB memory that was brand new this spring as well as 500/500 fiber.

confluence_perf 6y ago
Is this also on Cloud products? Right now on holiday (through Tuesday), but would like learn more. I see your contact info in your profile, if you give consent I'd like send you an email on Wednesday with some followup questions (the first question is "what is the URL for your cloud instance" so I don't want to be asking for it on a public forum) (edit: typo)
- crooked-v 6y ago
  > Is this also on Cloud products? On my company's cloud instance of Jira, it's a minimum of a 2-3 second delay to do anything. Edit, wait a few seconds, save, wait a few seconds, change a field, wait a few seconds... and God help you if you need to reload the page because something got stuck.

burnthrow 6y ago

Come on, everything is slow and you know it.

confluence_perf 6y ago
We have certainly heard from some customers that agree that 'everything' is slow, but we've also heard from other customers saying they have no problems. We would love to fix "everything", and we have some longer term projects focused on this -> However, "everything" fixes seem to be a more incremental boost and also take longer time to complete. If you have any feedback about "specific" items that are the most frustrating, we'd love to hear about those -> targeted fixes for specific can be much faster, much greater gains, and usually offer better user experience gain/engineering time returns. If not, I can only say that we are definitely working on making 'everything faster' (edit: trying to reply but looks like HN is limiting my reply rate) (edit: maybe I can post my replies here and hopefully they'll get read) ------ @rusticpenn - This is definitely possible that 'some users are just used to it'. But we also see a very wide variance in individual customers' performance numbers (ie. some instances have consistently faster performance than other instances), and even within individual instances variance amongst users (some users have consistently faster experience than other users on the same instance) -> we're trying what we can to narrow down the causes in this variance. Hearing from "users with slow experiences" is simply one of the ways we're trying to track this down, but it helps if users are willing to provide more info. -------- @ratww - thank you for the suggestion! We have some amount of data that helps us see what might be different between instances, but haven't gone out of our way to 'interview a fast customer', I'll bring this up with the team to see. The two biggest factors I think we've seen: slow machines can contribute (but not a necessity), and large pages (especially with large tables, or large number of tables) can contribute.
- rusticpenn 6y ago
  > but we've also heard from other customers saying they have no problems I am sorry, there are probably customers who are used to the tools. Maybe they don't pass the Mom test. That point comes out as unnecessary defense here.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    I think these maybe the same people calling Trump to say that he's a great president. Both claims are equally as unbelievable.

tw25613937 6y ago

Not trying to be snarky, but... do you use your product?

grzm 6y ago
These are questions I have as well. That said, creating a throwaway and prefacing a comment with "Not trying to be snarky" shouldn't be an excuse for not taking the time to couch questions in a way you're more confident aren't going to be interpreted in a negative way. This isn't directed just at you: I see this behavior all too often: people using throwaways as an excuse to not take the time to express things in a manner that doesn't need to apologize for itself. Atlassian employees use their products, and tips and tricks they may have to use them effectively, or make the experience of using JIRA or Confluence, or their other tools more enjoyable and useable would be great to know!
- dylan604 6y ago
  If you need tips or TRICKS to make a product useable, you have a BAD product.
  - grzm 6y ago
    I agree, and I also know that you have to deal with the world as it is right now even while you work to make it better. If you have to use Jira or Confluence at work, you probably want to know how to make that as useful as possible. If you're working at Atlassian, you probably want to make your customer's experience as enjoyable as possible as soon as possible. Ideally you have a great product and great documentation and all happy customers. If that's not the case, you have an opportunity to work on a number of fronts, including improving documentation and the product, and help current customers with the product as it is. You can and should be doing all of these things. Piling on doesn't help anything.
    - hchz 6y ago
      Some people don't want to use it at all, and don't care for the situation that C-suite everywhere buys Atlassian's trash. They don't want minor improvements to help it limp along, they want to vent and complain about it. I think it's impossible that Atlassian evolves into a good product company, but it's entirely possible that my next CTO googled for opinions on the product, found a few discussions on HN with a combined 3,000 complaints about what a garbage fire it is, and went with Clubhouse.

snypher 6y ago

As a product manager, are you allowed to discuss performance and benchmarks without violation of your contract? Or, is it just customers that are prohibited from this?

hchz 6y ago

"My boss told me to generate a bunch of JIRAs in reaction to the recent accurate discussions on HN of how poor our performance is, so I need specific dit-dot issues to buff our team metrics rather than address the cause of the issues, which is a political non-starter"

saagarjha 6y ago
A more charitable interpretation might be “my boss won’t let me fix things unless I have specific comments about problems from people who use the software”.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  Translation: His boss is an idiot and their lunch is going to be eaten by a company where management gives a shit about product quality.
- samb1729 6y ago
  If their boss doesn't let them just get to work without thoroughly documenting everything that's a larger problem. As good a time as any to start looking for jobs with bosses that don't suck.
samb1729 6y ago
There's nothing quite like having to spend a load of time justifying everything your team wants to do to the team above because they need to justify the things their teams need to do to the team above them. Sometimes things are just obviously crap to the people tasked with working on them and having to jump through these kind of hoops eventually leaves an organisation with only the kind of people who are happy to keep doing it. Nothing makes me stop ignoring recruiter messages quite like being asked to flesh out a JIRA ticket with technical details by a person who has literally no use for the details they ask me to write.