My first consulting gig at Adaptavist was with a company piloting the Atlassian tools to determine if they meet the company’s needs, and their pilot group of users was 120,000 people working in multiple countries. The only Atlassian training available at the time was traditional, seated, and for 12 people at a time, and the bid from Atlassian to deliver Atlassian University for this engagement was over $6.5 million. This inspired me to develop Atlassian and Adaptavist App training that scaled to meet the needs of Adaptavist’s enterprise customers.

The story of L4J over the course of 5 years featured a lot of twists and turns. It was my baby from the beginning and I handled feature design and definition, wireframing, customer interviews, and more. We were competitive with Atlassian University because our eLearning was far superior: it was more up-to-date, more engaging, and covered many topics that Atlassian’s official training didn’t.

In 2021, every risk I had identified to L4J happened. Most notably, Atlassian invested tremendously into their Atlassian University team and learning management system, and our tiny team couldn’t keep up with them anymore. We had a Jira Data Center app that customers loved and were about to release a Jira Cloud app, but I recommended to Adaptavist’s leadership that we retire the app and shift the teams to more profitable work.

I handled the retirement of the app and worked with our customers to migrate them to other training solutions so they could still get the service they needed. Adaptavist app training was moved into our documentation.