Roblox saves $150k+/year while boosting collaboration and productivity by moving to Atlassian cloud

A quest to stay ahead of the game

Roblox’s online gaming platform and marketplace went public at a valuation of over $40 billion, has over 67 million daily active users, and is played by over half of all U.S. kids under 16 – yet many people haven’t ever heard of it. The majority of those who have might think of Roblox as a gaming company for kids, but Senior Technical Program Manager Joe Cotant says, “It’s so much more.” 

Roblox is on a mission to empower a billion people with optimism and civility. Although the platform quickly gained popularity with children, half of its user base is over 13, and the fastest growing segment is 17-24 year olds. After watching fast growth during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, noticing the industry shift to cloud-based technology, and seeing demos of the superior user experience of Atlassian cloud tools, Joe says it was “the perfect time” to evolve. “Roblox is at the cutting edge of the gaming and metaverse. We can be at the cutting edge of collaboration and productivity as well,” he explains. And so began their journey from Atlassian Data Center to Cloud. 

Limited resources? No problem – partnership makes migrating possible.

When Joe pitched an Atlassian cloud migration to Roblox leadership, he was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get approval. “They saw the benefits. There was a keen interest in tracking our OKRs [objectives and key results] in Jira and moving other data and processes into the Atlassian platform,” he recalls.

Since Joe was the only full-time employee managing Atlassian tools at the time, he reached out to Roblox’s Atlassian Solution Partner, Modus Create, for help with strategic guidance, problem solving, technical support, and change management. Together, they evaluated the company’s Atlassian Data Center environments and developed a migration plan. After comparing multiple strategies, the team decided their Confluence instance was simple enough to lift and shift to the cloud, but Jira would be more complex and require a phased approach. 

Over the next year, Joe, Modus Create, and Atlassian worked together to get ready for migration. Joe and his Modus Create counterpart, Distinguished Consultant Mike Rathwell, had regular meetings with their 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, which Joe found crucial for adoption and satisfaction.

Throughout the process, Joe involved employees across the company to understand their use cases, show them the benefits of cloud tools, and build relationships with champions who could help support adoption. “There were only a few of us vs. about 3,000 employees at the time, so being able to leverage those folks who were Atlassian evangelists and who were embedded in the individual teams really helped us get that coverage across the entire organization,” he says. 

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. Joe says, “Overcommunicating, connecting with cloud migration champions, and sharing documentation smoothed the migration process for everyone.”

During the final stages of migration, Roblox, Atlassian, and Modus acknowledged that collaboration was the key factor that empowered their progress. “What made this migration successful was the rapport that we had between our teams. It was truly a partnership. We had a really good rapport between Atlassian, Modus, and Roblox. We were very frank, transparent, and open with each other, even in times where we weren't that happy with how things were going,” Joe explains. “And none of this would be possible without Modus. Mike gave an objective approach to decisions and was someone for me to bounce ideas back and forth.”

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

Embracing the ecosystem for efficiency, savings, and a better experience

Now, Roblox has a robust, cloud-based collaboration platform to power their work, including Jira for product development; Confluence for documentation; Trello for non-technical project management; Beacon for threat detection; and Jira Service Management for support for certain teams (with plans for expansion). “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. 

Users span diverse departments, from technical teams like Engineering and Product, to business teams like Finance, People, and Legal. Employees are particularly excited about the Atlassian cloud interface and about expanding Jira Service Management (JSM). Mike says, “JSM looks so much nicer in Cloud than it does in Data Center. We had people asking us for JSM projects as soon as we turned on the new portal.” 

For example, the People Team at Roblox primarily uses Zendesk for support. However, the team wanted to collect more information upfront when processing employee remote work requests, so they worked with Joe and Mike to set up more dynamic forms in Jira Service Management. Now, the People Team can gather all the necessary information during intake, minimizing the need for back-and-forth communication. The tool then automatically directs the request to the appropriate person for approval. Joe says, “The People Team has been super happy with the JSM solution we helped create for them, and we’ve since expanded to other use cases. We see our JSM footprint only expanding over time, and there are plans to migrate additional teams from Zendesk to JSM.”

In addition to JSM, business teams are loving Jira, which has eliminated the need to use other tools like Google Forms, Wrike, Notion, and custom-built apps. “Jira obviated what used to be the first choice – making a homegrown app – to do what Jira already does,” Mike explains. Joe adds, “For the two teams we've already migrated from Wrike to Jira (Marketing Creative and Developer Relations), each of those will amount to $150,000/year in savings. The Notion migration that’s in progress will amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars more in annual cost savings.”

Joe and Mike are now working on the Notion-to-JWM migration, setting up service desks for over a dozen other teams across the company (including People Science & Analytics, and Enterprise Applications), and incorporating Virtual Agent for even greater efficiency. Joe says, “What I'm most excited about is expanding the footprint of our Atlassian ecosystem at Roblox.” 

“Even the people that I couldn't convince before…they use it now and won't give it up!”

 It’s clear that Roblox mastered the migration “game” and is racking up results – and fans – with their Atlassian cloud tools. 

While seeing improvements in the way Roblox works has been rewarding for the migration team, Mike says watching minds change has been just as powerful. “The biggest impact that's been very gratifying is the change in the perception of the tools. They see that it makes life easier. They can spend time on adding value, not busywork. They can find the right information at the right time,” he explains. “Even the people that I couldn't convince before…they use it now and won't give it up!”

Joe adds, “Over time, we've been able to win folks over by removing manual barriers and using cool add-ons and integrations…We’ve seen firsthand that people can reduce the operational burden of certain processes and then pivot to work that's actually going to have an impact on the bottom line, like rolling out new features on our own platform.”

Working on an integrated platform has also optimized many of Roblox’s inefficient, tedious internal processes and uncovered new (and better) ways to work together. “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, which make cross-collaboration much, much easier,” Joe explains. “These types of integrations have really been pivotal in collaboration, productivity, and discoverability.”

In terms of discoverability, Joe has noticed that team members are finding what they’re looking for faster and more easily – not only because of Atlassian cloud’s superior search functionality, but also because of the cleanup done as part of the migration process. “We were able to address our tech debt and clean up a lot of our documentation during the migration. Once we migrated to cloud, folks were excited about having the one unified, ubiquitous search experience within the Atlassian cloud platform that would search across all products within the ecosystem. All of that really reduced the number of hours they’re spending looking for content and doing customer support.”

From the beginning of his time with the company, Joe has known that Roblox is “so much more” than a gaming platform for kids. Now, the company’s teams are realizing their Atlassian tools can help them achieve so much more too.