Product RoadMaps: Harmonizing code and vision with JIRA

"The productivity of software development teams depends on the tools they use and the environment in which they work" - Kent Beck

A right project management tool, acts as a bridge that connects your aspirations to the reality of successful software delivery. The tool that teams adopt and use on day to day basis does make a difference in the Delivery QoS. Amongst various Software Project management tools - MSProject, Gantt charts(now TeamGantt), JIRA and Basecamp, one platform, stands out - JIRA. Using JIRA, Project Managers can track and drive daily Agile-Scrum delivery, JIRA, dashboards and Project Plan for iterative metrics and project status report. Even executive dashboards(via a plugin) could be created that could be seamlessly presented to the Governing Board.?

From my experience of using JIRA for nearly a decade now, I have seen majority of the Project Managers, use minimal features of JIRA, just enough to track and export to excel :) While JIRA does provide capability to export user stories, defects, epics, themes to excel, it defeats the purpose of using JIRA.

For ones who would want to adopt JIRA for integrated advanced Project / Product Management, here are some quick snippets that would aid them embrace JIRA on all aspects of collaboration, including Processes enforcement

JIRA Product RoadMaps

JIRA provides few fascinating templates for Software development & Product management. (Other segments of JIRA include templates for Service Delivery, HR etc) . The product discovery in JIRA offers to create all the Product features, defects, operation tasks and others under the category - “All ideas”.?The name itself is a bit of a misnomer, but I am okay with it. As you write these features there is a need to tag an objective or a Goal to each of these features. The Goal could be - Necessary feature, Customer Delight, Compliance, Budget&Performance, Differentiating key feature. Here there is a need to create a custom tag. The default JIRA tags are a bit primitive. There are few key attributes/ tagging that are essential that would box the feature in terms of timeline, Customer Region, Budget, Impact and others.

Yearly planning is best done with JIRA Product RoadMap. JIRA simplifies the view by creating product roadmap that serves as a strategic guide, outlining the journey from a product's conception to its evolution and growth. Below is a visual representation of the product's future, highlighting key features and timelines that are NOT in date& time format, but would provide the entrepreneur the needed prioritization

JIRA Plan - Quarterly Planning simplified

JIRA Plan outlines the ideas, tasks created and maps them to a quarterly or a Monthly view. At start, a quarterly view always provides a bird’s eye view of the complete year, while the subsequent Plans could have a monthly view. It provides a structured approach to manage and execute the project, ensuring that all team members are aligned and aware of their roles and responsibilities. A visual representation of the project plan is crucial because it simplifies complex information, making it easier for stakeholders to understand the project's scope, sequence of activities, and interdependencies

Impact Assessment

The critical advantage of this feature is that it is collaborative. The core team could add their perspectives on their impact thus providing a trusted score. Once the impact assessment is complete, the prioritisation of the product features also could be reshuffled. There is also an ‘impact’ feature that relies on feedback from stakeholders. I particularly have not found much benefit from this, since most of the times, you would know what features needs to be planned and delivered quarterly. However, the ‘impact’ feature would help a founder, if he/she wants feedback from various stakeholders.

JIRA Dashboards

Once the product delivery gets rolling, I’ve particularly used a custom view that provides a combination of estimates coupled with Project status. I have aligned these two widgets vertically to get a quick glance of the status as well. Leadership can gauge the estimates and map the Product cost in a proportionate way. While the dashbaord below depict the Quarterly estimates, there is a need for a Monthly Release dashbaord that is more grounded and provides a day-to-day view of the Project status.

There are more JIRA features and widgets that are available to showcase metrics per Project, Group of Projects and Effort spent vs planned. This itself is vast topic of interest, considering the fact that executive stakeholders would be needing a quantified concise view, yet detailed enough. We will look into the Metrics part of JIRA in our next article. Keep watching this space!