An Emblem for Atlassian Customer Success

Project Brief

When Stephanie Berner joined Atlassian as Chief Customer Officer, she inherited three teams that had never formally worked together — and a workforce that had already lived through two re-orgs in my four years there. This was number three. She needed to signal that this time was different. She had four days, and she asked me to build the brand.

Process

I worked with Stephanie and her leadership team to define the positioning first — what this org stood for, how it wanted to be seen, and what it needed to feel like from the inside. From there, I developed the visual identity: a mark built to live where Atlassian culture actually happens — in Confluence pages, Slack emoji, Zoom backgrounds, and town hall decks.

Results

The emblem launched at the start of Stephanie's global listening tour and has remained the identity of the Customer Success org ever since — through two more re-orgs and significant shifts in company direction. The project also opened the door to deeper, more strategic work: it was the foundation of the trust that gave me a seat at the table as the sole Service Designer driving programs like Advisory Services Next and Building the Operating System for Customer Success.

The context

By the time Stephanie arrived, change fatigue was real. People had been through this before — new structure, new leadership, new promises. The teams being consolidated had their own histories, their own identities, and not much reason to believe this re-org would feel any different from the last one.

At Atlassian, culture is a serious asset. People send Karma to recognise peers. They blog on Confluence. They genuinely care about the company values — 'Play as a Team' isn't just a slogan, it's how things actually get decided. In that environment, a well-crafted internal brand isn't decorative. It's a tool for moving people.

The mark

The design needed to do a few things at once: feel like it belonged inside Atlassian's visual system, while also asserting that this org was its own thing — not a sub-function, not a support team, but a group with a clear mission and a reason to exist.

The customer's voice was the organising idea. The mark implied listening and convergence without being literal about it — an identity that felt strong and cohesive rather than service-y. I built it to scale from a Slack emoji to a full slide backdrop without losing its intent.

Built to scale from Slack emoji to stage backdrop.

The listening tour

Stephanie took the brand on the road with her — meeting teams across time zones and geographies as part of a global listening tour. The emblem showed up in every pre-read, every Confluence page, every deck ahead of each stop. By the time she arrived in person, it wasn't new. People had already started using it themselves.

That's what you're really after with something like this: not adoption from the top down, but people claiming it as their own.

Deployed across internal communications, tooling, and the listening tour presentation suite.

What came next

Building the Operating System for Customer Success

The org had ~20% user drop-off in enterprise adoption, 20+ stakeholders touching the customer journey with no shared language, and three teams that had never formally operated together. The work was to design a 9-service-area framework that gave the org a common vocabulary and later informed the creation of two new specialist teams.

Deliverable(s)
A unified customer journey map and operating framework that became the shared foundation for how the org planned, delivered, and measured customer outcomes.

Advisory Services Next

A flagship advisory service was bleeding money — running at a -77% margin — and even its own customers couldn't describe what they were paying for. The work was to turn an undefined, relationship-based offering into something legible, consistent, and sellable across every region it touched.

Deliverable(s)
A service blueprint and branded delivery framework that standardized how the team engaged customers from first contact through value realization — later validated by a 260% ROI in a third-party economic impact study.

Back to Home