Great software teams around the world all share a common goal: to build products that users will love. The majority also have something else in common: tens of thousands of teams rely on Jira software every day to plan, track, and release their products.
But the composition of each of those teams, how they work together, and how they structure their workflow, is as unique as the products that each is taking to market. With that experience comes wisdom, and the amazing opportunities to share, learn, and be inspired by how other teams are working and running day in and day out.
In the spirit of teamwork, we’re launching a new series of stories about amazing teams and the work they’re doing together, with the goal of inspiring all teams to build products, faster, with Jira.
Great teams run on Jira
To collect the richest insights possible, we did what we often do, turned to our most trusted resource: our customers. The seven teams that kick off this series span a variety of industries and sizes, but share one thing in common: using Jira to ship amazing products, together. So, without further ado…
500 million users across 300,000k teams and Dropbox is just getting started. Dropbox’s New Projects Team believes in shared goals, a customer-first mindset, collaboration, and personal connection as the key pillars to building a high-functioning team. Jira enables them to move quickly as they work to build and release innovative products and features, but equally important is the fun the team has on a day-to-day basis. Parker, a member of the team, shares “we have great teammates, and that makes it easier to come to work every day.”
The faster DonorsChoose.org scales, the more public school’s benefit. This non-profit, which facilitates direct donations to public schools, grew their annual donations from $3 million in 2007 to an astounding $130 million in 2017. With such amazing growth, the DonorsChoose.org’s team relied heavily on Jira to help them scale. What initially started as a bug tracker, Jira now facilitates teamwork across employees in various geographic locations across the United States, helping them to track everything from bugs and tasks to large-scale projects. The transparency of the platform is a reflection of the open and passionate culture of the team itself, who harbor a shared enthusiasm for the mission.
Walmart Labs pursues a single source of truth to serve 250 million customers each week. At 17,000 users, Walmart Labs is one of the largest Jira implementations in the world. The Enterprise Tools & Technology is the team that works tirelessly behind-the-scenes to enable each of those users to be as efficient, transparent, and productive as possible. To that end, they strive to create complete visibility into the work of any given project, which results in measurable time and financial savings since the thousands of users they support have one place to find and complete work, not multiple.
Optimizely goes global while smashing geographical barriers. With office locations worldwide, the teams within Optimizely aren’t always sitting next to each other, but Jira enables them to collaborate seamlessly. A team member in Sydney can add her work in Jira, and team members in San Francisco will see the progress as soon as they come into the office the next day. Productivity gains like these have encouraged organic growth of Jira usage across every type of team at Optimizely. The tool now spans traditional engineering and product teams, but has also found its way to Legal, Sales, People Operations, and even Facilitates.
Pandora, where project management is equal parts art and science. For the teams that work at Pandora, music and human connection are the north star, and Jira is the tool that guides them there. The Technical Project Team uses Jira every day to facilitate Pandora’s latest innovations. Jira handles the project management details of their work, which gives them the time and energy to nurture the human relationships that make teamwork so rewarding.
Transparent work = great work at Kiva. Kiva, a global nonprofit organization that connects lenders with borrowers to alleviate poverty, uses Jira to promote a culture of openness where every opinion is heard and valued. Anyone can contribute an idea in Jira, and clearly see its priority amongst all the other projects. Jira is structured so anyone can comment on why (or why not) something is prioritized, which means everyone has a very clear idea of what is being worked on and why.
The pursuit of company values starts with technology at Twilio. “Be thoughtful. Always deal in an honest, direct, and transparent way.” This value, also known as “No Shenanigans,” is a guiding value for all of Twilio’s teams. The company’s Jira implementation adheres to this value by making work as open as possible: ninety-five percent of all their projects are completely accessible to every employee so information can be shared openly and directly. The company has even been purposeful about integrating Jira with other tools like Zendesk and Salesforce to promote complete visibility into a project in a single view.
Now, It’s Your Turn!
We love each of these seven stories for many reasons, but we also know there are tens of thousands more teams using Jira every day. We’re hungry for more great stories of teamwork, technology, and innovation. Tell us about how you and your team use Jira Software. We’ll reach out to the most compelling submissions with further details and the possibility of being featured on an Atlassian Jira Software billboard!