Customization Is a Cost: Lessons and Best Practices From ABS Laundry Solutions

From Lotus Notes to Jira

The exploration started around 2010 and 2011, when ABS ran a software development life cycle that Tatiana described as slow and fragmented. The industry was shifting from waterfall to an early agile mindset, and the team decided Atlassian fit their future. After two years of exploring and defining, they migrated from a Lotus Notes implementation into Jira in 2014.

One number captures why that mattered. Before the move, a developer had to fill in roughly 100 fields on a screen before the work could progress. In Jira, ABS cut that to about 30. From there the footprint grew, out of software development and into customer support, then project management, and eventually to Bitbucket. The company had found a tool it liked and kept extending it.

The Trap of the Perfect Custom Fit

Then came the lesson that shapes everything Tatiana believes now. As ABS built out its solution, it customized heavily to match exactly how the team worked. The result was fast and smooth and felt wonderful to use.

It was a trap. By tailoring the system so tightly to the needs of yesterday and today, ABS optimized itself into rigidity. When tomorrow brought different needs, the beautifully fitted solution would not bend. The team wanted to make changes and found it painfully hard, and the days filled with operational complaints and no clear path forward. Their customers reinforced the same habit from the outside. Tatiana quoted the request every product team recognizes, a customer insisting a button stay on the screen, admitting they no longer use it, wanting it there simply because it had always been there. That instinct, multiplied across a whole system, is how rigidity sets in.

Has your own instance quietly optimized itself into a shape you can no longer change? It is worth asking before the complaints start.

2020: The Focus Shifts From Tools to People

The pandemic forced a reinvention. With everyone working from home, ABS Laundry Solutions had to protect its people first and keep serving customers without disruption. That pressure produced the realization at the center of Tatiana’s talk. The tools were never the point. What ABS actually shaped, every day, was the behavior of its colleagues and customers. So the company changed its focus from tools to people and started with human resources.

ABS Laundry Solutions redesigned its HR processes and rebuilt them inside Jira. Recruitment became a Jira project. So did onboarding, training, career development, and performance evaluation, replacing the old world of papers, tests, and face-to-face rooms. Employees could suddenly see the whole journey through the organization laid out clearly, and they valued that transparency, along with the paperless, more sustainable, lower-cost way of working it created. A rigid tool had become a way to treat people better.

Moving to Cloud, One Deliberate Step at a Time

By 2023, ABS decided to break out of its rigidity and move to lighter workflows in the cloud. That first attempt failed, because trying to do it all at once was too complex. Rather than force it, the team chose to move in steps. In 2024 they went from Jira Server to Jira Data Center as an intermediary stage, simplifying workflows enough to help without so much change that people could not absorb it. In 2025 they turned to the question of how to finally reach the cloud.

This is the chapter we lived alongside them. Working in partnership with Life in Codes, ABS went live with Confluence in the cloud on the first of January 2026. Jira and Jira Service Management are still in progress, with the goal of completing the move by the end of the year, and the two teams are working closely to get there. Tatiana’s account of that stretch was generous, and the reason it worked is the same reason the earlier steps did. Nobody tried to leap the whole distance at once.

What 14 Years of Experience Taught Them

Tatiana distilled the experience into a set of lessons any team modernizing on Atlassian should sit with. The first is a line worth taping to your monitor:

“Customization is a cost, not a feature.”

Customization matters, she was clear about that, but you should reach for it only after thinking hard about the price it carries in future flexibility. Alongside it sits her broader rule that simplicity scales while complexity does not. She urged teams to involve people early, because you design solutions for real colleagues rather than abstract entities you assume will adopt whatever you ship. Updating a version of Jira for the sake of shareholders is easy. Bringing along the product manager who has to write a specification, and the developer who has to build from it, is the actual work. She also argued for designing for evolution rather than perfection, since shipping something good and improving it beats holding out for flawless. And she reminded the room that platforms enable transformation while people’s mindsets are what move an organization forward.

Then she said the thing that meant the most to us to hear, speaking about the partners in the room: “they are protecting us from our own complexity”

That is the job as she sees it, and it is the job as we try to do it. A good partner keeps you from tailoring yourself back into a corner and holds open the room to keep evolving. Tatiana reached for the Japanese concept of ma, the meaningful space around things, and argued that every organization needs that space to grow. The recurring questions she and her team put to themselves and their customers are the ones you should be asking too. What should stay standard? What genuinely creates competitive advantage for this specific business, worth keeping even at the cost of some complexity? Keep the flavor that makes you distinctive, and challenge every assumption before it hardens into a workflow.

Measuring People by Growth, Not Only Output

In the questions afterward, Tatiana gave a glimpse of how far the people-first thinking now runs. ABS built performance evaluation into a Jira project, and it looks at people two ways. The quantitative view counts the familiar things, tickets handled and commits made. The more important view assesses capabilities, skills, and competencies using a snowflake model that defines an optimal level for a given role. That role shifts from year to year, because a developer buried in Android work one year grows different strengths than the same person building Angular web applications the next, and ABS has many full-stack developers moving between both. Layered with 360 feedback, the model helps ABS see where each person can grow and bring their greatest value. She was candid that the work is unfinished, not yet rolled out everywhere, and sensitive to culture, since her American, Dutch, and Romanian colleagues each read performance evaluation differently.

Designing How Work Happens

Tatiana closed on the sentence that captures why her story matters beyond ABS:  “We are no longer implementing tools, we are designing how work happens”

Fourteen years took ABS from wanting a development team to work a little better, through the seductive trap of a perfect custom fit, into a company that treats its tools as a way to shape how humans experience their work. The AI, the robots, and the automation all around us are worth having, in her view, so that people can enjoy the work more, not less. Watching a client tell that story in her own words is the honour we mentioned at the start, and it is the reason we do this work. If any part of Tatiana’s fourteen years sounds like your own, the custom fit that stopped bending, or the pull toward the cloud without unsettling the people who depend on the system every day, then you already understand what she learned. When you decide it is your turn to evolve, we would be glad to do it beside you. Keep it simple, and bring your people with you.