There are two key things that need to happen to bring a potentially valuable idea to life. First, your team must determine the “why”: Why is the idea worth pursuing? Does the hoped-for impact justify the effort? Does it solve a customer problem? Does it support the business goals?
If the why proves to be sufficiently promising, your team must next answer the question of how they will make the idea a reality: What work is required? Who will be involved? What is the timeline?
Answering why and how requires a lot of communication and collaboration across various teams and stakeholders. Jira’s project management software equips teams with integrated tools that help them stay in close contact – from brainstorming to the delivery of innovations.
Step 1: Understanding Your “Why”
Modern teams are in constant communication with their customers, they closely monitor the activities of their competitors, they constantly coordinate with internal stakeholders – and there is usually no shortage of resulting ideas. The question is why the team should favor that specific idea over another.
With limited resources and customers constantly waiting for innovations, it is all the more important to do the right things. That’s why Jira offers prioritization and roadmap features that help teams make informed product decisions together.
This is what determining the “why” in Jira can look like:
Prioritizing Ideas
Bringing the best ideas to the surface starts with data, discussion and the right practices. By creating a discovery project in Jira, the team is able to transparently map ideas, add context and share insights into the background, such as relevant customer requests or feedback from sales.
Individual views and fields can also be created to evaluate ideas based on goals, effort, business impact and other criteria. Having all this data and information in one central location encourages sharing within the team (and beyond) and makes it easier to answer the question of which ideas will potentially generate the most value for customers and the company.
Alignment With Stakeholders on Roadmap and Strategy
Once prioritized to the best of their knowledge, the strongest ideas should be incorporated into the corresponding product roadmaps so that all stakeholders – from account managers and sales professionals to management – get a holistic view of what will happen when and why.
Like all custom views in Jira, roadmaps can be configured so that the different target groups receive exactly as much detail as is relevant to them. From here, the discussion can continue and the roadmap can be refined and adjusted according to stakeholder assessments, who in turn have the opportunity to leave comments, votes and reactions.
Linking Product Idea and Execution
Once there is a commitment to an idea on the roadmap, a seamless transition to implementation planning is required. This means first linking it to a process in a software project. The subsequent implementation process can be tracked directly in the corresponding idea; conversely, the underlying idea is visible in every relevant process.
This increases visibility and promotes alignment across the teams involved – regardless of the Jira projects in which they are working.
Step 2: Defining the “How”
If there is alignment across teams and stakeholders, the question arises as to how a good idea on the roadmap can be transformed into a profitable, valuable product change. Development often involves cross-functional aspects and dependencies of varying degrees. Creating a plan that is both robust and flexible is therefore anything but easy.
The advanced planning options in Jira help the teams involved, from product management and development to marketing and design, to always have an overview of how their work interacts.
This is what it can look like when the how is defined in Jira:
Breaking Down and Planning the Implementation Work
To bring an idea to life, the first step is for the team to identify what specific work is required and then break it down into tasks. Thanks to the expandable task hierarchy, plans can include multiple ideas, projects and goals. This gives teams a common space to coordinate who does what and when it should be done, without losing sight of the underlying goal – the “how”.
Native features such as capacity management, dependency mapping and scenario planning allow teams to balance workloads, minimize risks and reorganize quickly if plans change.
Linking Implementation and Delivery Strategy
When the new product feature finally takes shape in implementation, it’s time to involve other teams such as marketing and PR to support delivery. Overviews in Jira make it possible to oversee multiple business projects and track all go-to-market activities in an environment designed specifically for non-technical teams, while still providing a familiar user experience. With Jira Work Management merging with Jira Software, teams from across your organization can even more seamlessly collaborate.
For cross-functional end-to-end collaboration, these business projects can be integrated into the plan to link the product roll-out with the marketing launch and ensure that all teams are up to date.
Live Reports for Stakeholders
Reporting is quick and easy for the work mapped in Jira. All Jira views that pull data from the relevant projects are updated in real time. The team only needs to select the desired view and the level of detail required to share accurate information with decision-makers and other stakeholders.
For example, if the development team shares a product roadmap with customer-facing teams or business stakeholders, they can easily cut and export a high-level timeline showing what is planned for the current and next quarters.
Do you want management to get an update on how teams are progressing with programs or initiatives? The report can be filtered to a desired level of detail at any time and integrated directly into a Confluence page as a dynamic live snapshot.
Product Development With Jira
Jira provides product and development teams with effective tools to give good answers to the two most important questions that go hand in hand with a new idea: Why and how? And Jira offers many more options for flexible, transparent project management.
Want to know more about the exclusive development features in Jira Cloud? Seibert is an Atlassian Gold Solution Partner with experience from hundreds of Atlassian projects. We would be happy to advise your team on evaluation, take care of licensing, and help with implementation. Get in touch with us below to schedule a (free) appointment!