Roblox boosts collaboration and saves $150K with Atlassian Cloud

OUR WORK INVOLVED

• Jira and Confluence instance migration
• Jira Service Management expansion
• Third-party integrations
• Documentation and resource management
• Addressing technical debt

IMPACT

• INTEGRATED collaboration platform
• BETTER user experience
• $150K saved in operating cost
• 3K users helped

Roblox is a massive online gaming platform and marketplace with over 67 million daily active users, including half of all U.S. kids under 16.

Managing such a high volume of users and their pace of growth is no small feat. To stay ahead of fast growth and industry movement toward cloud technology, Roblox decided to migrate its Atlassian instances to the cloud. This would not only allow for savings in operating costs but also help Roblox consolidate its workflows in one unified platform.

Challenge

Embracing the cloud despite limited resources

Cloud migrations can be intimidating, especially for companies with limited resources and experience. But through partnership, it’s possible – and equally powerful.

Roblox had only one full-time employee managing Atlassian tools – Joe Cotant, Senior Technical Program Manager. Joe reached out to Atlassian Partner of the Year 2022 Modus Create, for help with strategic guidance, problem solving, technical support, and change management. Modus Distringuished Consultant Mike Rathwell joined forces with Joe to evaluate the company’s Atlassian Data Center environments and develop the migration strategy.

A lot of startups would benefit from the experience Tweag brought to the table. It has set a very solid foundation on which we can grow now. – Joe Cotant, Senior Technical Program Manager, Roblox

Cloud migration plan and approach

After comparing multiple strategies, we decided that Roblox’s Confluence instance was simple enough to lift and shift to the cloud, but Jira Software would be more complex and require a phased approach.

Over the next year, Roblox, Modus Create, and Atlassian worked together to prepare for migration. Joe and Mike had regular meetings with Atlassian Cloud Migration Manager Evan Golden. Evan facilitated connections with Atlassian’s technical experts to address problems, grasp the cloud platform’s changes, and exchange training documentation.

Throughout the process, Joe involved the Roblox team to understand their use cases, show them the benefits of cloud tools, and build relationships with employees who could help support adoption. The migration team also made a point to communicate early and often with each other and Roblox’s users via Slack, email, and Atlassian tool notifications. Overcommunicating, connecting with cloud migration champions, and sharing documentation smoothed the migration process for everyone.

Addressing technical debt and improving user experience

Cloud migration provided the ideal opportunity for Roblox to clean up documentation and optimize inefficient, tedious internal processes. “Before, our team saw Atlassian as individual tools and not a suite of products. But now we’re able to use things like Jira macros and Smart Links within Confluence and Jira Work Management, which make cross-collaboration much, much easier,” Joe explains. “These types of integrations have really been pivotal in collaboration, productivity, and discoverability.”

Moving to the cloud also enabled the team to improve the user experience of the integrated platform. Using add-ons and integrations reduced the operational burden of certain processes, freeing up time for work that impacts Roblox’s bottom line, such as launching new features. Migration also created one unified, ubiquitous search experience within the Atlassian Cloud platform that could search across all products within the ecosystem. This considerably reduced the number of hours Roblox was spending looking for content and doing customer support.

Tools used

Impact

Robust cloud-based collaboration platform

Today, Roblox has a robust, cloud-based collaboration platform to power their work, including Jira Software for product development; Confluence for documentation; Jira Work Management and Trello for non-technical project management; Beacon for threat detection; and Jira Service Management for support. “We’ve been able to eliminate other duplicative or repetitive tooling, which has been awesome, and really embrace and recognize the entire tool kit together as an ecosystem, not individual tools,” Joe explains.

It’s not just technical teams that have benefited from the migration. Business teams are loving Jira Work Management (JWM), and support teams are moving from Zendesk to Jira Service Management (JSM), eliminating the need to use other tools like Google Forms, Wrike, Notion, and custom-built apps.

Roblox’s success story serves as a testament to the potential of the Atlassian ecosystem, showcasing its benefits across user experience, cost, performance, and, most importantly, collaboration.

For the two teams we’ve already migrated from Wrike to Jira Work Management, each of those will amount to $150,000/year in savings. – Joe Cotant, Senior Technical Program Manager, Roblox

Atlassian Partner of the Year 2023

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