Why We Built Pendo Reports for Confluence

At Pendo, the product and engineering teams use Confluence for almost all knowledge sharing.

An idea might start in a meeting or Slack thread but it’s not canon until we’ve captured and shared it in a Confluence doc. It’s the cauldron where data from a variety of sources get mixed into the message—the purpose—of what we’re doing next. One of the most-shared data sources in Confluence is Pendo itself (as you might expect from a tool that provides product insights). Almost hourly, our product managers copied and pasted rows from reports or charts from our web app’s UI to help describe the point of a doc. When we approached the team about an Atlassian product integration, the choice was obvious; it should be Confluence.

Once we decided to build the integration, many questions remained. What should we build? Where should we begin? What is the steel thread to build first to get this party started?  The integration build took a few unexpected turns. Here’s a bit of that journey.

It all started in Portland, Ore. Atlassian was conducting its annual App Week Cloud there in June, just as we were kicking off the project. What are the odds? This event is all about helping development teams learn, build, market, and support apps on Atlassian’s marketplace, and we’d shipped a small team of two across the country to take it all in. In a single week, we unexpectedly expedited the entire project.

With a week of dedicated time, we learned the Atlassian environment and used their APIs to build a proof-of-concept app that took the results of a Pendo poll (specifically a yes/no type poll) and rendered it as a bar chart in a Confluence doc. I’m pretty confident we are a case study for what Atlassian hopes to accomplish with App Week.

We barely scratched the surface of all the ways to build upon Atlassian’s framework that week. But we had our steel thread and were in a position to start iterating. Also, as a side note, Portland is awesome. There is so much to love about the city, but my personal favorites are the food pods and incredible breweries.

Now, back in Raleigh, we were poised to turn the proof-of-concept into a product. Through continued discussion and interviews with product teams from some of our customers, we took the second unexpected turn and decided to leverage our reporting API and infrastructure to change the initial functionality from polls to reports. Now, you can build a report in Pendo and add it to a Confluence doc. This lets users pull in a larger breadth of Pendo data to accommodate a wide range of scenarios. Don’t worry, polls and many other Pendo resources are still on the roadmap.

Pendo and Atlassian are a great complement to each other. Pendo is on a mission to improve society’s experience with software by providing user insights, guidance and communication to digital product teams, and Atlassian has become the medium of communication that helps those teams advance shared goals. Together, our platforms help foster a well-informed product team able to best align efforts to delight their product’s users.

Pendo’s new integration empowers product teams using Confluence with an easy way to bring in supporting product data to validate and build confidence in their decision-making process.

Check out the integration for yourself here.

Brec Carson is a senior engineer at Pendo.