Atlassian · Design Lead
An org-wide VPAT audit uncovered gaps blocking enterprise and public-sector deals. Fixing them was step one — building a vision for keeping Atlassian accessible by default was the real win.
Context
Atlassian's products power governments, hospitals, banks, and universities — organizations legally and morally bound to serve everyone. If our tools couldn't be used by people relying on screen readers, keyboard navigation, or assistive tech, we weren't just failing users; we were locking Atlassian out of the enterprise and public-sector markets that demand accessibility as table stakes.
Retrofit accessibility into a legacy platform at scale — while critical bugs blocked enterprise and public-sector deals, and no shared process existed to keep it from breaking again.
Unblock the deals immediately, and make inclusion a permanent part of how we think, design, and build at Atlassian.
The Audit
By working in a deeply embedded fashion with product and engineering, our team remediated all critical issues within 9 months. This remediation consequently unblocked multiple enterprise deals, resulting in immediate revenue increase.
The Realization
Fixing individual issues would only buy time. Internal and external customer research made the real pattern clear: without changing how we work, the gaps would just come back. Keeping them gone meant a complete overhaul of how we worked — and I led the design vision for it, grounded in what that research surfaced.
The Vision
The lasting outcome wasn't a one-time fix — it was a new way of working. We stood up a cross-functional accessibility team with shared rituals, tooling, and acceptance criteria, making accessibility a first-class input across design, build, and QA — not a late-stage audit.
Contact
I'm interested in an exciting new challenge. Let's do some amazing work together.