Talking the same language - via tools? a.k.a Integrating PLM and Development processes
Many times I have seen development teams adapting to use tools like Jira to manage their backlog and development processes while product management teams use other tools or no tools at all to manage the product management deliverables and then product release alignment is done manually through checklists. This obviously is not perfect as there is no single view of all the work being done, who is working on them and what their status is. Also the lack of formality for the product management work items causes that many of them are worked in ad-hoc manner in the lead up to the release. Also sometimes it leads to under appreciation from the development teams in regard to the work product managers are needed to do. One of the often flaunted reasons for not having a formal product management work item backlog is that the role of product managers in most cases involves work that is not easily captured in backlog, can be planned in advance and/or tend to stretch across multiple release cycles. These are things like training and enabling the sales teams, participating customer calls to support sales teams, doing market research and analysis, performing competitive analysis.
What is the issue?
Many times there emerges a communication gap between the product team and the development team due to this massively different approach to way of working. This is especially true if the Product Managers are not from a technical background and thus not familiar with development backlog tools. Also keeping in mind that product team is not only composed of the product managers, but also marketing experts, commercial subject matter experts and other people crucial to the product success. It may even start from the basic concepts of what is meant with stories, tasks, DevSecOps, way of capturing requirement, origin of requirements, traceability of functionality that has been implemented.
At best of times I have seen this being addressed by both teams using Jira but operating in their own separate projects with different workflows and siloed view of the releases.
One Approach to solving this
However it is possible with Jira and any other backlog tool to adopt and configure stories, tasks for multiple purposes and link these together so that disparate pieces of work can still be worked on, tracked and reported through unified means. This leads to being able to deliver better quality, reduced overheads in releasing, ability to react faster to changes in priorities and better alignment of the release contents.This approach allows release to happen in synchronous manner and ensuring that not only technical aspect but also topics like sales collateral updates, commercial models revisions, sales and operations enablement have owners, are tracked and completed in time for a successful release.
This comes via aligning the processes of the product and development teams as depicted below in simplified manner.
Another useful and practical approach is to have predefined ticket (Epics / Stories) types with default tasks and responsibilities across product and development team to ensure that the organisational knowledge is utilised to the fullest.
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