Jira suite updates mean to ease collaboration

BY DAV I D R U B I N ST E I N

Atlassian fleshed out its Jira suite with a new product Jira Product Discovery and the availability of other tools designed to more fully bring together all of the roles that are part of software development creation and delivery

The company also announced the free integration of its Jira Work Management tool into Jira Software, and a new slant on its Jira Worfklow Templates now designed by customers According to Atlassian’s Agile solutions head of product Megan Cook, the integrations with the Jira Software suite helps organizations ideate, prioritize and jumpstart their efforts to deliver software that will make a real impact on the software’s users.

J i r a P r o d u c t D i s c o v e r y, w h i c h i s available in an open beta for which customers can sign up, was created to help organizations identify which new product features to build, based on research, customer feedback and internal prioritization Cook pointed out that this traditionally has been an unstructured effort “Software teams have efficient processes in place for building the software and managing it once it’s out there, and dealing with incidents,” she said “But when it comes to discovery, that’s often been a bit of a black box ”

So decisions on what to build often are made in a vacuum, or driven by

Jira Product Discovery provides a dashboard into which all the ideas for a product can be viewed, and each idea is matched to a business outcome It also can help with prioritization, based on data such as strategic value, user impact and more “You can define anything that’s important to the team and the team can actually see which goal this [feature] is supposed to hit, how much impact to the users, and what does it rank in terms of advancing as a strategy?,” Cook explained what Cook called “the loudest voice in the room, ” rather than being about the outcomes the company needs to drive.

The interested parties develope r s , p r o d u c t m a n a g e r s , m a r k e t e r s , executives come into the room with their spreadsheets, backlogs, mental notes and emails, and debate and discuss and prioritize features together

But Atlassian believes it’s critical for all these teams to get aligned before any code gets written, to help ensure what will be built will achieve the organization’s goals

Because Jira Product Discovery brings transparency to the decisionmaking, all the roles around development can contribute to the product, each with their own diverse ideas. This, Cook noted, connects what was invisible about product development to the rest of the business, giving all stakeholders a view of all the ideas as well as the ability to rank the value of each, which leads to better decisions and better outcomes for the company “So product managers can gather their team, they can set the impact and effort scores for each idea to see what will drive impact for the customer and the business,” she said z