Prior to combining Jira and Jira Work Management, the former was widely adopted amongst engineering and technical teams while the latter was considered a more intuitive way for business teams to access the power of Jira.
But as Jira evolved and offered more features, AI capabilities, and general accessibilities for non-technical teams, it was time for the two to come together.
To seamlessly onboard current customers and thoughtfully evolve Atlassian’s existing product roadmaps required strong cross-functionality across engineering, design, marketing, and data science teams – just to name a few – powered by 500 employees spread over almost every timezone.
For Leith Stevens, Atlassian Head of Product for Jira Growth and Enterprise, merging Jira and Jira Work Management meant “intense buy-in” from his team.
This complex journey that we got done required probably more than anything, teamwork.
–Leith Stevens, Head of Product for Jira Growth and Enterprise, Atlassian
At Atlassian’s Team ’24 Europe event, Stevens shared how he helped lead a collective of teams to achieve such a feat–without interrupting the customer experience.
How to make a major product feat swift and smooth
After establishing shared goals, Stevens focused on creating a plan for all teams to ensure timely, accurate execution. That’s where Plans, a feature in Jira Premium, came into play.
Plans allows for real-time reporting, making it easy to customize, save, and share different views tailored for stakeholders. With Plans, Atlassian’s Program Management team aligned marketing, engineering, and design teams on goals while giving each individual team the ability to customize their own project to support their way of working.
For example, software development teams could use Agile, sprint-based workflows, while creative teams could leverage waterfall workflows. Both could stay aligned on the project’s overarching goals and give leadership full visibility into progress.
Using Jira’s dependencies view, project teams can address potential conflicts and effortlessly pivot when another team’s progress is delayed.
Our learning was that these previously siloed teams now had their progress tracked centrally, and that gave them confidence that we’re meeting the right goal. By doing so, we created a top-down visibility, inside the plan, ensuring all stakeholders understood the progress and were confident that they were on track.
–Leith Stevens, Head of Product for Jira Growth and Enterprise, Atlassian
3 major learnings from collaborating on a large, cross-functional Jira initiative
Although complex and seemingly ambitious, Stevens and his teams achieved their goal of merging Jira Software and Jira Work Management on time to an overwhelmingly positive customer response.
After looking back on the process, Stevens and the over 500 project team members shared these three key learnings:
Jira is for everyone
This initiative underlined the need for teams to collaborate on a single platform. Sure, they need to work in their own optimized ways, but all of that work has to be clear and visible across all teams. With asynchronous, centralized updates, teams can focus on getting work done instead of meeting with leaders to share progress reports.
Streamline work with consolidated tools
Empower your teams to do their best work with existing tools and to identify cross-functional dependencies early on. This helps them consolidate project updates and quickly address potential conflicts to uphold leadership confidence.
Async wins every time
The era of distributed work and accelerated projects means asynchronous communication is crucial to productivity. However, async isn’t just for global teams. “It’s just as powerful if you’re in the same time zone or even in the same office,” Stevens emphasized.
Enabling async work means employees have flexibility regarding when they’re most productive, helping to reduce fatigue, encourage retention, and improve the quality of output.
Make the impossible, possible with Jira
Plans, Goals, and other Jira features enhance collaboration across business, creative, and engineering teams. From complex time-sensitive projects to day-to-day operations, our new era of Jira is already making teams more strategic, adaptable, and competitive – but don’t just take it from us:
We’ve been able to eliminate other duplicative tooling, which has been awesome.
–Joe Cotant, Senior Technical Program Manager, Roblox
Learn how Atlassian helped Roblox save $150,000 annually while improving cross-team productivity.
If you’d like to see how Jira can help your teams launch the next big thing, explore more Jira features and try it free here.