Donna McGahan

What I'm known for

Career timeline

Most recent first. Tap a role to see what I did there.

1. 2026 – now

   Gift Giving · builder, giftgiving.funmy own product

   A live gift registry product with real users, built and run end to end, as a way to stay hands-on with the technical side.

   • Built and operate giftgiving.fun: Spring Boot and PostgreSQL on Railway, with email, scheduled jobs and real-time updates.
   • Run it like a support leader would: GA4 funnels, admin tooling, and a written record of every incident and what it taught me.
   • Over 650 automated tests, including browser tests written from bugs that really happened.

   The lesson I'd bring to any support team: silence is not health.

   A post-event page told owners nothing had been claimed, and nobody complained. A nightly job failed every night and its logs read like a quiet evening. A page sat dead for eight weeks. No ticket ever arrived for any of them. I now watch for the problems customers can't report, and I build checks for them.

2. Oct 2025 – Mar 2026

   Fiskil · Technical Support Lead

   Created and ran the support function for a consumer data-sharing platform.

   • Built the support function from scratch, supporting the trust customers place in user permission data sharing.
   • Worked daily in Google Cloud, JIRA and Confluence, helping customers get onboarded and productive.
   • Wrote the Q1 support strategy: better first response time and time to resolution, a 10% reduction in caseload, protecting an already strong CSAT average, and acting on customer feedback.
   • Developed NPS and CSAT surveys so customer feedback was collected on a regular basis.
3. Aug 2022 – Feb 2023

   Transport for NSW · Customer Support Manager (contract)

   Led the team supporting JIRA, Confluence and Point to Point Transport services, and moved Atlassian tools from behind the firewall to the cloud.

   • Managed a team of 5 supporting JIRA, Confluence and Point to Point Transport services for all Transport for NSW staff and external customers (taxis, hire cars, rideshare and other passenger services).
   • Managed JIRA and Confluence instances behind the firewall and in the cloud, and helped the organisation migrate both to the cloud.
   • Picked up support cases when the team needed it.
4. Sep 2019 – Mar 2020

   Nearmap · Director, Global Support

   Ran a global support team across Australia and the United States.

   • Developed the company-wide 2020 support strategy: a customer programme for support, an NPS survey and customer churn analysis.
   • Helped move the team from Zendesk to Service Cloud, including the training that made the switch smoother for staff.
   • Handled Level 2 (advanced) cases when needed.
5. May 2018 – Sep 2019

   Salesforce · Manager, Technical Support, Premier Priority

   Ran the top tier of technical support for Australia's largest Salesforce customers.

   • Trained the team to be proactive rather than reactive by understanding what each customer needed.
   • Owned incoming Severity 1 and 2 issues, making sure they were resolved quickly and the customer was happy with the outcome.
   • Met regularly with key Premier Priority customers about the support they were getting.
   • Built the plan for global coverage of APAC Premier Priority customers.
   • Set up quarterly reviews of proactive monitoring and automations with customers.
6. Feb 2016 – Nov 2017

   Mode Analytics · Customer Support Manager, San Francisco

   Hired and trained the company's first dedicated support team, taking support over from the founders and developers.

   • Hired and trained the first dedicated support team.
   • Worked with product management to cut support load by prioritising key feature requests and bug reports.
   • Built the NPS voice-of-the-customer programme, including closing the loop with detractors.
   • Managed the development and launch of the Mode community forum.
   • Developed the training programme for new support hires.
7. Feb 2015 – Feb 2016

   Zenefits · Client Support Manager, Case Reduction, San Francisco

   Helped the fastest-growing SaaS company of its day cut support caseload without hurting customer experience.

   • Developed a case reduction programme that had Client Support and Engineering coordinating on product changes to reduce caseload, and found other opportunities through customer education and internal process improvements.
   • Preliminary results showed a 15% decrease in cases per customer.
   • Wrote weekly and monthly case-reduction reports with recommendations, shared with Client Support management, Product Management and the executive team.
   • Created a cross-silo Customer Experience team to define the non-negotiable experience standards and Zenefits' service promise to customers.
8. Aug 2013 – Dec 2014

   Amazon Web Services · Customer Service Manager, Sydney

   Built a customer service team for APAC Enterprise customers, and created the Concierge programme, now part of AWS Enterprise Support.

   • In one year, built a top-performing, customer-obsessed team that held the top customer quality score for the last 8 months of that year.
   • Developed the global Concierge programme, giving Enterprise and qualified Reseller customers personal, proactive service. It has since become a published feature of AWS Enterprise Support.
   • Managed development of a global Enterprise customer on-boarding programme covering AWS account management and billing strategies for more cost-effective use of AWS.
   • Built the Concierge training and certification programme used for all new Concierge staff worldwide.
   • Managed the soft launch of the Concierge phone service.
   • Laid the foundations for an NPS analysis process and a new AWS Net Promoter System, closing the loop with detractors and passives.
   • Developed non-negotiable experience standards for AWS Sydney Support, running brainstorming sessions with front-line staff to get buy-in.
9. Nov 2005 – Oct 2013 7+ years

   Atlassian · from Senior Support Engineer to Customer Experience Manager

   Grew from support engineer to leading customer experience for a global team of about 100 people. My teams were consistently ranked highest in customer satisfaction and NPS across the company.

   Nov 2011 – Mar 2013

   Customer Experience Manager

   Responsible for training, mentoring and monitoring the customer experience from Atlassian's global support team of about 100 people in five countries.

   • Created a company-wide Customer Experience Guild. It won executive buy-in and led to a larger company-wide focus on CX strategy.
   • Developed the Enterprise support programme for JIRA and Confluence.
   • Introduced the "Code of Legendary Service" and a "Code Review" programme to help managers coach their staff.
   • Developed "Tweet Your Support Experience", a 2012 CXPA Innovation Awards finalist. Invited to speak at the 2012 CXPA conference about the programme and Atlassian's customer-centric culture.
   • Launched Legendary Service Bootcamp training for all new support staff.
   • Redesigned the partner referral programme and the customer loyalty programme.
   • CX programmes contributed to overall customer satisfaction rising from 84% to 86% and Service NPS from 44.5% to 48 (FY11 to FY12).

   Mar 2009 – Oct 2011

   Regional Support Manager, Sydney

   Managed the Sydney support team of 11 support engineers, reporting to the head of global support.

   • Built a customer-first culture that produced a team score of 88% overall satisfaction.
   • Worked on the global initiative to re-introduce team leads across support, including hiring them in Sydney and helping organise a week-long managerial offsite for team leads from all five offices.
   • Led global Confluence support readiness for Confluence 4.0, then the biggest release in the product's history, with training and communication for all five support offices.

   Nov 2005 – Mar 2009

   Senior Support Engineer and Team Lead, San Francisco and Sydney

   Support lead for Atlassian's flagship products, with 4 direct reports and the highest tier of customer escalations.

   • Received top marks in customer satisfaction: 9.8 out of 10.
   • Built supportability features for Crowd, including a logging and profiling feature that let customers quickly change logging levels and send performance data to support.
   • When I started, I was solely responsible for most US support for all of Atlassian's products.
   • Managed and mentored team members, including technical and soft-skills coaching.
10. Jan 2004 – Nov 2005

    Penn State Outreach Information Systems · Project Lead and Application Programmer/Analyst

    Where the technical side began: led development of the university's first non-credit online registration system.

    • Coordinated the team that delivered Penn State's first non-credit online registration system, estimated to save staff about 30 hours a week.
    • Built into it S.O.A.R. (Search Online and Register), a search component updated daily from the university's data warehouse that could be added to any website.
    • Met with campus Directors of Continuing Education and other unit heads to fit the system into their processes.
    • Designed the Penn State Outreach intranet and was a Penn State certified instructor.

Education and credentials

• BA in English, The Pennsylvania State University
• Java, Python, SQL, AWS services and Atlassian products
• SatMetrix Net Promoter Certification (2012)
• Salesforce Certified Administrator
• Customer Experience Professionals Association, local networking event coordinator