What is the Need for Jira/Asana?

Resources for product managers Tools and pro-tips
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May also want to check out Airtable and / or Notion.

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Yeah. I have tried Notion for personal stuff. No opposition as such at the moment but I am not sure how i can use it to maintain roadmap on it. Let me see for some sample roadmaps. And also Airtable. Thank you so much :blush::hugs:

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Well I can it is very costly. Not only finance wise, but also other peoples time. Even the delivery team will have to spend time curating all the work in a tracking system. So how are those costs being offset? Don’t just do something because you think you should, do it because it adds value to the company (and not just you).

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Very valid point. I have a good sync with the delivery manager and she is herself frustrated from using sheets and emails. But she is not ready to support me as she is very new into the system and doesn’t want to look demanding being a new joiner. She also indeed pushes me to migrate to some tools

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Simplest answer : You save money and deliver products quicker!

Having JIRA allows you to track progress, which they can as well. Thus, you don’t need weekly 1 hour meetings to provide updates which can be found through a kanban board.

That’s 52 hours/man saved yearly! Throw in 15 people involved, you’re saving 780 hours(that’s ~30K right there) of work and throwing the same into building products.

If that ain’t value, IDK what is.

Edit : You could also throw in how it adds accountability, since each person involved has their own story that they fully own, it shows in the work they do and saves you time identifying bugs/issues later when information is available in a fragmented form.

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We spend one hour every Monday to decide weekly priorities and share the update on email. Then on Thursday morning, the management reviews the weekly priorities status again with the team. We generally meet all weekly priorities, but there two problems here:

  1. The constant need to zoom in to weekly priorities and zoom out to quarterly priorities is there and very difficult to achieve. Quick weekly win gives adrenaline rush to everyone and creates a perception that we are making progress whereas we are not.
  2. The details are scattered all the over emails and Google sheets. At end of every quarter i spend one full day to collate details.

I deeply hate such meetings and is also ashamed in front of my team members who think I am from stone age.

I desperately need those tools.

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We spend one hour every Monday to decide weekly priorities and share the update on email.

And if you put these items into another tool, will that speed up your meetings? Or will you just spend an hour debating over Jira tickets instead?

The details are scattered all the over emails and Google sheets

I’ve seen badly-managed ticketing systems where you can’t find the details because they are spread over tickets in multiple projects. Again, the tool choice may not be the root of your problem here.

I deeply hate […] I desparately need

I’m not convinced you’re not just letting your emotions and frustrations get the better of you. There is value in these tools, if used properly, but you seem to think any change is going to be beneficial - while being unable to articulate why.

Jira has sometimes been the best thing ever, and sometimes the nightmare I hate to tackle: because it’s just a tool. What’s more important than the choice of tool is how you plan to use it, and why. Answer those first. Look at your frustrations through the lens of the five whys, and make informed decisions, not emotional ones.

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I definitely knew that I am driven by emotions rather than business need. Because the team is able to deliver an average performance without any tool or agile methodology implementation. That’s why I came on this sub to gather inputs of experts. It’s very important that i have a concrete plan to fix the issues. But before I have to identify and documents the issues. And the suggested framework seems very powerful that can take me to the root of the issues (which can be me as hypothesis)

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It’s also better to disprove a need. Look at it as others have suggested, from the perspective of your manager who is approving the budget. Think up reasons that he will also think up: what value does it bring, how does it justify the cost, could you accomplish it another way for less, etc. These are the questions you will have to face, so you need to be (over)prepared for them.

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On a second thought, I kinda agree with u/cardboard-kansio

Although what I articulated earlier(there is value) still stands true, it also depends on who would use it. JIRA for one is a double edged sword, unless the devs and business side are actually keen on making them useful(by spending time, which goes against my earlier comment), it’ll only hurt you as you now argue about incomplete JIRAs and then forcing devs to document in the JIRAs which only hurts your relationship with the devs and effectively their productivity(which against goes my earlier comment).

So to summarize →

  1. JIRA(what I used) has value
  2. It also depends on how keen other stakeholders are in utilizing it
  3. JIRA is a double edged sword, better not have it unless you can use it well
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Very well summarized. I have to win confidence of every stakeholder in this case. As immature implementation of such tools can mess relationships

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Asana is free and JIRA is like 10$ for a small team, what do you need to justify? :smiley:

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Valid point. It’s a start up where each one of us is expected to have middle class mindset. Asana I haven’t explored yet.

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I mean, you can pay for it yourself and show how much better you can work with it than with the system you’ve got now.

Btw, if you’re now at the point of choosing the software, I wouldn’t go for one of those. Asana is not scalable and JIRA is just old and slow. Try looking at the new boys in town, ex. Clickup, Linear.

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  • jira and asana have features that would take a long time to update or create in sheets
  • jira and asana are building features and updates for you so you don’t need to maintain your features in sheets
  • they are more approachable for newcomers and have better visibility for reporting for higherups, with things like automatic burn charts, timelines, cards, lists, and kanban boards built in, which means better out of the box flexibility
  • you can keep momentum going faster with asana and jira because you need to put in less work to set them up, whereas excel is much more manual and can be more complex to access simpler things

does jira and asana not have their own pages selling their products? this should help you. why do you want to use those things? imo btw, i prefer asana because jira lacks some pretty basic view capabilities.

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Certainly. This is very helpful. I will understand how they themselves pitch their products to others and that becomes an important part of my suggestions. This is real nice. Thank you so much :relaxed:

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Some of the things that you can say is that it is difficult to manage google sheets as the team size and project complexity is increasing.

Also the user experience of jira with commenting, better filtering, bulk changing ability and having a clear board with priorities and tickets helps.

It is something that will increase engineering efficiency as well and can help sales track specific tickets that they have interest in

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This is amazing. Especially the last point of sales team will be decisive for him

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Can share how NOT using Jira despite having it is causing a major pain for us when building a platform spanning 20+ squads and an equivalent number of PMs and a lot many engineers.

  1. Multiple sources of truth - none complete or reliable. So, every PM conceptualizes how their service, or experience layer will work assuming the other service areas and experience will behave in a certain manner. And there’s not one single source of truth for that so it leads to massive confusion especially from the engineering teams. In theory, this just needs better collab than jira, but I bank on the fact that engineering teams need ONE source of truth to build a feature and they look for it in Jira.
  2. Managing dependencies - When features are cross squads and at times, partly being delivered by a combination of vendors in addition to internal teams, managing dependencies is a nightmare without having a jira. Advanced roadmap feature bubbles all these concerns up which the execs like.
  3. Unmeasurable dev metrics that impact product roadmap - How do you find out which squad/ feature is the long pole in a release without getting a handle on each of the squads’ velocity. We usually ask the PMs or the POs to create epics which the EMs give a high level sizing/ estimate on. This goes to dogs in absence of jira tickets because our PMs drown the EMs in a sea of Confluence pages and Google docs (which keep changing every day - out goes any semblance of scope management) Knowing dev constraints before planning a release can throw sizeable dents in your roadmap and GTM strategy.
  4. Splitting new feature dev, bug fixes and BAU work in your backlog is a mess. Bugs are almost always in a jira or an equivalent tool. So is BAU if you have a good SRE or ops team. And for any PM, its always a challenge to play favorites among these 3. Now imagine if these 3 categories exist in different tools. I have a hard time just linking two separate jira projects as is - imagine not even having a jira for new feature dev. That’s painful.
  5. Exec rollups are time taking - if working among the teams itself is such an uphill battle, imagine if you’re a group PM tasked with consolidating all this and presenting a unified vision which has engineering buy in to the leadership. Sure you can do it once. Try doing it once every week without custom dashboards on jira - it will quickly eat up all your time.

These are a few specific to me. See if any apply to your situation.

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OMG! My PO deserves a capable and reasoning person like you. This is like summary of this entire thread. Thank you very very much :heavy_heart_exclamation::heavy_heart_exclamation:

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