Hello Community. This is my very first post on this platform. Hope I get some good support and suggestion to my query.
I’ve used a specific product management tool, such as Aha! or equivalent, in my previous roles. This has aided me in the development of tools like roadmaps and the ability to attach high-level epics and features to releases before they are later synchronized or created in Jira or Azure DevOps, among other things.
There doesn’t seem to be any specific PdM software in use in my current place of work. Do any product managers use Jira exclusively for this kind of product work? Or alternative (free) tools? If so, how? I’m looking for ideas.
@AngelaBlue, I agree with PPT. Executives find the elaborate roadmap you decide to keep for the team confusing. Eight to ten epic-level feature titles should fit on one PPT slide with a horizontal timeline, which can project out two years, which is sufficient for software project management.
I show mine with stop lights that indicate where each person is in the process over the course of the quarter and in priority order. In order for everyone to know, I also list the cost of each item.
Check out Jira Product Discovery (Beta) - I have a friend working at Atlassian as a Snr-PM in another product and they have started using it internally recently:
I’ve previously used Jira for product management. The discovery management technique is not the ideal with this application, and I quickly became overwhelmed by all the qualities (plus how slow it can be at times). With that stated, you may obtain a useful degree of information via initiatives, epics, and stories. Initiatives had concrete goals for us, such a 10% increase in retention. The concepts that we intended to investigate to realize this endeavor were all included in epics. This topic is covered in greater length in a Jira article here.
Having said that, Jira encourages the team to begin development and forego exploration because it is a development tool. I am aware that this is a delicate matter that can be resolved if the team is in the right frame of mind and has sufficient expertise, but for me, it wasn’t ideal. Since then, I’ve urged every team to establish a separate discovery tool from Jira (this can be a PM focused tool like Productboard or Aha or just a general project tool like Asana if set up properly). The idea is to take your time and test your hypotheses rather than jumping right into building and turning your team into a feature factory rather than a strategically focused one.
It’s not solely focused on roadmapping right now. However, you can create a customer-centric product management system with feedback, task and documentation modules.
Thanks! I’m definitely interested, the problem is that I’m between jobs at the moment, so I don’t have current real-world scenarios to test out. But I will sign up today and play around with it and get back to you later this week.
Jira is a project management and work tracking application, not a planning tool. It can be used to plan and manage a backlog at the team level, but it struggles to handle multiple teams or portfolios.
I did learn recently that Atlasian’s Product Discovery tool is currently available in free beta. Consider taking a look at that. It is undoubtedly free only until it is not. However, it is now.
