Atlassian products all the way
Working with product teams means having to know a plethora of tools and products. I have a background of being a developer and now I work as a product manager with Blueconch technologies. I love building products for other developers and I specialize in the cloud technology domain.
I started using Jira when working with one of my clients that used the entire product suite of Atlassian, which meant using Confluence for documentation, Jira for project management, and Bitbucket for code repository.
Ever since I have taken up the role of a product manager, I have had the opportunity to work on MVPs, now this has its own challenge because you're trying to build the right product and it may or may not work. Along with designing products, I have also helped set up teams and the tools that our team members should use. Atlassian products have always been my first choice for their amazing configuration capabilities, their seamless integration with each other, and for how developer-friendly they are.
You might wonder what this blog is about, most of you here probably know about Atlassian and their products already. I want to explore the other products that they have and see how they can fit your product teams.
Atlassian product family includes two versions to operate, their cloud products and their data center products. You'd find the list here
Let's explore their products now.
Jira - Everyone who's anyone in products knows about Jira, its a very powerful project management tool, which gives you powerful administration capabilities to configure how you'd want to operate your team projects, help you manage releases and track issues. integrate with chat and other software for collaboration and needless to say provide you great project management capabilities.
Jira Service Management - As an enterprise, you need an IT Service management tool to track service requests and bugs, now this is applicable to products and your external customers or internal requests and customers. Imagine and automation, where when your product has a failure and it logs a ticket in Jira service management and assigns it to your tech support person. Jira service management might not be as powerful as ServiceNow, but from a pricing standpoint works well for small to medium enterprises.
Jira Core - At first this product offering confused me, why have another project management software when you have Jira already. Jira core seems like a light version of Jira, Jira is highly configurable and is meant for project teams working on development products, their audience is people who use Agile, work as software teams, but Jira core is for a different set of audience, your marketing and finance departments can use this to track tasks and configure workflows, get started quickly with Jira Core is the promise.
Confluence - Confluence is no doubt one of the best documentation tools I have seen. It's just perfect to have meeting notes to product documentation to having your architectural diagrams. Maintain internal as well as external-facing workspaces for customers. No other documentation tool comes close to Confluence. It's powerful and ever-evolving.
Bitbucket - Bitbucket is Atalassian's offering for a code repository, it's based on GIT and provides a neat interface for users to create workspaces, check in their code, do reviews and have CI/CD using bitbucket pipelines. It's simple and fast and has a much better and user-friendly interface than git hub.
Atlassian Access - Atlassian Access provides single sign-on across various Atlassian cloud products. Although I don't know how this would be beneficial, I would have my enterprise's SSO configured instead so that I don't have to bother about another email address.
Atlassian Market Place - The last and one of the most profitable products for Atlassian has to be their marketplace. The marketplace offers ways for the public to share their plugins for others to consume through products like Jira and Confluence. The concept is amazing and the execution is awesome too.
That's what Atlassian offers for their cloud products, in the next blog I will cover the bit on Atlassian's data products and explore some of the products they have recently acquired. I would also like to talk about products they can probably build to attract a greater market share.