Atlassian’s acquisition of Cycle marks a significant step in improving customer feedback integration into product development. Founded by Mehdi Boudoukhane in 2019, Cycle has quickly become a favored solution for companies aiming to understand customer feedback deeply. With AI-powered capabilities, Cycle ensures customer voices play a central role in shaping products. Atlassian plans to incorporate Cycle’s technology into their existing Jira Product Discovery tool, signaling a shift towards more intelligent and customer-driven product management.
Cycle, founded with the backing of the startup studio Hexa (previously known as eFounders), has been part of a larger landscape of ambitious SaaS products such as Front, Aircall, and Spendesk. The firm’s recent $6 million Seed funding round enabled its strategic growth, where it secured clients like Brex, Qonto, Alan, and Alma as it grew into an indispensable feedback engine for product-led companies. This acquisition fits with Atlassian’s historical strategic moves towards enhancing their product offerings through thoughtful acquisitions and strategic integrations.
What Makes Cycle Stand Out?
At the heart of Cycle’s appeal is its ability to translate customer feedback into actionable insights, an essential component for product development teams. The AI-powered platform ensures every stakeholder remains informed, promoting transparency and trust across users, sales, product, and engineering teams. This function aligns perfectly with the needs of Atlassian’s Jira Product Discovery users, emphasizing the practicality of this acquisition for Atlassian’s broader strategy.
How Will the Integration Influence Jira Product Discovery?
By embedding Cycle’s feedback engine into Jira Product Discovery, Atlassian provides its customers with more structured insights tied to ideas, features, and customer impact, streamlining the decision-making process. This integration eliminates the need for product managers to rely on anecdotal evidence or disconnected data inputs, offering a more intelligent framework for product discovery processes.
“When we met with Mehdi and the Cycle team, things just clicked: we share the same experience and vision for what great product management looks like, and what customer-centric development feels like,” said Tanguy Crusson, Head of Product for Jira Product Discovery at Atlassian. “They’ve built an impressive product that connects feedback with customers and uses AI to distill it into actionable insights.”
The integration of Cycle’s technology will result in the discontinuation of its standalone product. However, the core features that made Cycle successful will be included directly within Jira Product Discovery, preserving the impact it originally brought to product teams.
Cycle joining Atlassian is an example of the company’s strategy to bolster its primary tools with innovative solutions that support efficient product management practices. This is not the first time Atlassian has expanded its capabilities through acquisitions, reflecting its ongoing commitment to delivering sophisticated tools that cater to evolving business needs.
Atlassian’s purchase of Cycle and its subsequent integration into Jira Product Discovery showcases the continuing evolution of product management towards data-driven decision-making. By embedding Cycle’s feedback engine into Jira Product Discovery, Atlassian aims to make customer insights an intrinsic part of the development lifecycle. Companies leveraging Jira Product Discovery can expect a more sophisticated approach to handling customer feedback, which may lead to more impactful product strategies.
