Using Jira for product management is like using a hammer to drive in a screw. It’ll get there, but it’ll be an ugly process and pretty much impossible to unwind.

James Mayes, Co-Founder at Mind the Product

Jira is a great development tool and it does what it’s supposed to do: it helps you to manage the completion of development tasks. Jira is where your dev team plan their sprints based on tickets that are fully formed and ready to go.

As a product manager, your job is different. Along with managing stakeholders and projects, you need to protect your dev team from outside interference. As a product manager, it’s your job to answer the question, “What should we work on next?”

We’ve all used Jira for product management backlogs because there hasn’t been a better way to manage them. However using Jira for product management also means that you create a lot of noise for your dev team to wade through – they don’t need to see what may or may not be built in the next sprint or quarter, or look into ideas that may never see the light of day.

As a product manager, you don’t want a list of stuff to build. Rather you need to figure out the right stuff to build. The right stuff is constantly evolving as you learn and iterate – and Jira is simply not designed to keep up with that.

The problem isn’t Jira. It’s how you’re using Jira. It’s time to think about splitting strategy and execution.

How To Build A Jira Product Management Workflow

The key to nailing product management with Jira is to break your process down into two distinct parts: strategy and execution.

Strategy is when you define what problems need to be solved, establish priorities and collaborate with stakeholders to develop solutions.

It’s your creative phase – the phase in which you collect up the data and information in your product backlog to figure out what to work on and how you want to tackle it. You establish your roadmap, validate ideas and iron out what you plan to accomplish.

This element of your workflow doesn’t play to Jira’s strengths and is better suited to a tool which has been specifically built for the job – like ProdPad.

Execution is when you knuckle down and build.

This is your production phase. You set up sprints, release plans, manage resources and develop what’s been sent over from the product team. This is what Jira is suited to.

In the diagram below the first three boxes show the strategy work that should be done in a tool like ProdPad, and the second three (green) boxes show the execution work that is suited to Jira.

From strategy through to execution

Using a tool like ProdPad that focuses on a product manager’s needs, rather than one that’s been designed for the dev team, means that you can define the differences between strategy and execution.

It’s a process that helps you to stay in control of what gets built and it means that nothing is left to chance. It also addresses one of the biggest problems of product management – that of leaving critical product decisions to the end when the dev team is about to pick up a ticket.

So before you move to execution in Jira for product management, you should be sure that your product specs are more or less solid. Are the ideas fleshed out and approved? Can developers open the task and see clearly and quickly what needs to be done? If the answer to these questions is yes, then you can push your product through to Jira and let the dev team do their stuff.

Using another tool for strategy means that Jira is only used for fully formed ideas. It means that you can work on what’s coming up next, and the dev team can work on what’s being built right now. And Jira is no longer a place where ideas go to die.

Get this strategy phase right and your dev team will know exactly what to build, and have lots of product context. It also gives you as product manager the space to build a roadmap of what’s coming up in the future.

5 Steps to Getting Your Strategy Right

1. Building your roadmap: Define your product vision and objectives

Don’t leave home without a product vision. Because… where are you going exactly? What value do you want to create for your customers? The product vision is the cornerstone of your product strategy and the anchor for every decision you make. That includes your business objectives (or OKRs), or the metrics by which you measure growth and success.

Even though your vision and objectives sit at the very top, they’re an important part of everyday product planning.

They help you to focus on ideas that matter to your business and what ultimately makes it on to your product roadmap. Without a product vision and objectives, your roadmap won’t have a clear focus.

2. Validate ideas in your product backlog

You should always be collecting ideas with a business case for your product backlog. It’s the beginning of the validation process. You always need a business case to understand what’s behind this new idea and what problem it represents. Without this you run the risk of losing focus and product/market fit.

We’ve designed ProdPad to collect ideas with a business case. When someone submits a new idea, ProdPad asks them why they’re submitting it before it creates an Idea Canvas.

The Idea Canvas is a powerful way of validating ideas. You can continue expanding your idea with all the following elements until it’s a fully-formed product spec, ready to take out of the backlog and move to Jira.

• Business case – how this will create value for customers or business?
• Impact vs. Effort – what is the impact on the business and for customers? Is it a huge project? How much time will it take? What about training?
• User stories – what is the user trying to achieve?
• User personas – who are you building this for?
• Designs – what should the final solution look like?
• Customer feedback – what are customers asking for?

The Idea Canvas is also the means by which you can educate your company to talk about the product and get more detail on the ideas in your backlog.

3. Look for themes in your product backlog (still strategy!)

The backlog is never as long as it looks. All those backlog items usually end up representing a handful of problems, which we call themes.

Themes are what you should really be going after. They represent the root of the problem that you want to solve for your customers.

Themes show you the scope of the problem and give you the bigger picture view of what needs to be solved. If you can identify themes, you can dramatically reduce the number of ideas you need to juggle.

For example, look at how these three different product ideas really point to just one problem area: the inline checkout flow.

In this case, Inline Checkout Flow is the theme (and you can see its objective is Revenue).

Now, you’re no longer looking at a pile of features to build. Instead, you’re looking for ways to solve a problem.

As you identify more themes, you’ll have to decide which ones to prioritize for your product roadmap. Remember to keep an eye on your product vision and objectives!

Your product roadmap will look something like this:

4. Prioritize the ideas that matter (still strategy!)

Analysing your backlog can be a daunting task – it’s often a just long list of tasks and wishes and it can be hard to sort out what should come next. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

ProdPad has designed a priority chart which allows you to sort your backlog in a number of different ways. It lays out all ideas in the backlog, based on the impact/effort scoring that you give each one, so that you get a visual of the health of your backlog.

In the priority chart shown below each dot represents an idea. The size of the dot shows you how well spec’d the idea is, the color shows you when the last update was (hot pink is the most recent). So you can see that the chart enables you to make decisions on what you do next, where you might make a quick win, and so on.

5. Get the team involved in writing product specs

Writing product specs is a process in itself – and it needs as much care and attention as you can give it.

If you’re working in a bigger company or large teams, you should err on the side of over-communication: more context and more deeply detailed specs. As a rule of thumb, the more moving parts that are involved, the less you want to leave up to interpretation.

There’s a lot at stake here. In this stage, you’ll find edge cases, surprise requirements, misunderstood functionality and even realize you’ve misjudged the scope of the task.

So catch these issues now before you move into development.

Bring in teams and individuals with relevant expertise to help you write user stories. Ask for stakeholder input. Hold product discussions. Design and test some quick prototypes. Do some user testing.

Jira doesn’t give you the space to collaborate with people across your company, but don’t skip it, as it gives your development team critical context. Developers can’t be efficient when their backlog piles up with a bunch of half-baked product specs.

When you’ve done your due diligence and the product spec is ready, you’re finally ready to push to Jira.

Push to Jira

Once you’re ready to execute, the ProdPad Jira product management integration makes it easy for you to push the work to your dev team in Jira. This integration means you can still control the following:

• You can choose how things go over to your Jira team: you have flexibility over issue type creation
• Status syncing keeps you posted on the progress of issues
• Push to your custom and required fields in Jira

Final thoughts

Clogging up Jira with your product backlog slows people down. Making a busy dev team pick through these tasks forces them to slow down their production pace to pick through tasks. And it doesn’t allow you to have the bigger picture you need either.

So think of Jira as the final destination instead, and approach your product backlog in terms of strategy and execution. Use another tool to define the problems that need to be solved and to prioritise, and once you’ve got this strategy right, then you can move to execution in Jira.

Need more info on working with ProdPad and Jira? Check out our Help Centre

Enjoyed this article? Check out our product management blog for more key insights.

The post How To Nail Your Jira Product Management Process appeared first on ProdPad.

Product Managers vs Developers

One way to understand the difference between ProdPad and JIRA is to look at who these tools are used by. Essentially, your developers will live in JIRA while everybody else in your company uses ProdPad. Product Managers require a tool that allows them to capture everything they could do from many different sources. However developers need visibility of every task that will be done, and to follow the operational progress of those tasks. Only tickets that are spec’ed and approved for development have a place in JIRA, the developer’s world. Integrations allow each team to benefit from the information held in each system without having to leave their own sphere of activity.
[bctt tweet= “Only tickets that are spec’ed and approved for development have a place in JIRA – #prodmgmt”]

Finite Tasks vs Fuzzy Backlog

So what qualifies JIRA for development tickets and ProdPad for product ideas? One advantage presents itself as soon as you separate finite, confirmed tasks and a fuzzy backlog. JIRA is designed for task management, and ProdPad for idea management – each of which has a very different working approach. There’s nothing more de-motivating for a developer than to find 500 tickets in their queue, knowing they can barely scratch the surface. JIRA is designed to see tasks through to completion; when you limit the number of tickets in JIRA to only these actionable tasks your development team can work confidently to clear them.

Nothing ‘fuzzy’ or undefined should make its way to JIRA, and anything that does should be sent right back to ProdPad. This is the holding place for everything you could do, that helps you decide whether your development team should build it. ProdPad has a low barrier to entry that allows you and your team to capture ideas at their earliest stage, and tools to help you easily review where details need to be fleshed out. There’s no harm in having 700 items in your ProdPad backlog, as with powerful search and filtering, nothing can ever be lost. Work in ProdPad is an ongoing process to surface the next viable ideas for your developers to build.

By keeping your undefined maybe’s in your ProdPad backlog, you’re keeping your development team happy and sane in their own day-to-day lives.

Tech-savvy vs open collaboration

The core design of ProdPad and JIRA makes them differently suited to different people in your team.

Evidently, developers work well with high-tech tools. And given that project management tasks should be ready for execution, there’s not a great need for collaborative features in JIRA itself. In fact, bringing a wider team (ie. your commercial or exec teams) into JIRA will likely only cause confusion and disruption for all parties. However, a product management tool needs to be much more open to company-wide communication. ProdPad has an accessible interface that’s easy for anyone on your team to understand, with collaborative tools throughout that allow you to spark up a conversation on just about anything. 

Systems Talking

A solid integration is of course key to ProdPad and JIRA working together seamlessly. Product Managers can control the synchronization of only ready-to-build ideas from ProdPad to JIRA with the click of a button. Links in each system allow developers to find out more detail when they wish to, without being inundated with unnecessary information. And status syncs between the two tools means that each team can find out everything they need to know from a single location. With the help of an effective technological relationship between ProdPad and JIRA, you can build an effective relationship between product and project management.

You can read more about the ProdPad and JIRA integration here. 

Or if you’d like to see for yourself how ProdPad is designed for better product management, sign up for a 14 day free trial here. 

The post Why JIRA Alone Can’t Help You To Do Better Product Management appeared first on ProdPad.

Integrating ProdPad with Trello

First of all, it’s now possible to map ProdPad ideas to Trello cards, giving you more control and options about what information is sent to your Trello board.

And on top of that, we’ve developed a two-way integration with Trello that allows you to automatically update an idea’s status in ProdPad when a card moves on your Trello board.

It’s really easy to get set up and start benefiting from these new integration points. From the Integrations page, select mapping from your Trello integration and select which fields you’d like to sync. These changes will be updated automatically for every other colleague who copied your original integration too.

If you’re a Trello user and would like to find out more about integrating with ProdPad, you can find out more here or get in touch directly with one of the team.

The post ProdPad and Trello take it to the next level appeared first on ProdPad.

What are the advantages of syncing ProdPad with other systems?

ProdPad is a home for Product Managers to live and breathe new product ideas. Collaboration is a hugely important part of this process and so the involvement of other colleagues in idea management through ProdPad is key to success. But other teams use their own tools and processes to carry out their daily jobs, and different people need access to different levels of information.

A completely syndicated relationship between ProdPad and your development tools, CRM or support system means data is consistent no matter where you look without forcing changes to people’s workflows.

How do custom integrations work in ProdPad?

Creating custom webhooks allows you to push ideas from ProdPad into third party applications, while the API allows you to automate updates to ProdPad when the status of these ideas change in those third party applications.

Setting up these two components creates an effective two-way integration.

1. Creating a custom webhook for the URL you’d like to share ideas with will provide you with a custom option under ‘Push idea to…’ on your idea page
2. Using the statuses endpoint of the ProdPad API, you can create a mechanism to integrate with your 3^rd party application
3. Mapping statuses between ProdPad and your application directly from the ProdPad UI will complete your data sync

You can read more on this process in this How-To Guide.

To find out more about using ProdPad alongside your existing systems, you can get in touch with us here.

The post Custom Two-Way Integrations for Product Management, Your Way appeared first on ProdPad.

The post Introducing a New and Improved API for Product Management, Your Way appeared first on ProdPad.

Now, more than ever before, your development team, your product folks, and the rest of your company, can all be on the same page when it comes to what’s working through the pipeline.

Custom, flexible status mapping

We work with the custom statuses you already use in ProdPad, allowing you to map them up with the issue statuses you use in JIRA. Essentially, when the status changes on JIRA, it updates on ProdPad, allowing the rest of the team to see where their ideas are in the development cycle.

A prod/dev flow that makes sense

So now, you can expect to work like this:
1) Capture ideas and start fleshing them out into product specs in ProdPad.
2) Once you know what you want to build (see our handy roadmap tool for that), push the idea over to JIRA to create a ticket out of it.
3) Now that your dev team is on the case, whenever they update the status of the idea from, let’s say, “In development” to “Testing”, you and your team can see that update on the idea in ProdPad.

Integration with JIRA made easy

So to get this all set up, it’s pretty simple.

Jump into your account and head to the Integrations & API page, or follow along our helpful step-by-step guide showing you every click of the way.

It takes just moments, but once you’re done, your product and development teams will be more in harmony than ever before.

If you’re not already on ProdPad, you can start your free trial today!

We love getting feedback, and we’d love to hear about how this improves your workflow or what you’d like to see come out next. Get in touch any time at hello@prodpad.com.

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Using Statuses to Manage a Product Backlog

Part of keeping your product backlog nice and tidy is being able to identify where your old ideas and feature requests currently reside.

Is a feature in development? Then mark it as ‘In Development’.  Is it nearly out there? Then mark it as ‘In QA’.

We’ve just launched ‘Custom Statuses’ for ProdPad, allowing you to add statuses like ‘In Development’, ‘In QA’ or whatever else you see fit.

You can even use these statuses to capture the reason behind archiving an idea. When you archive an idea, it stays in ProdPad (though not in your active backlog), so you can still find it later.
When you archive your next idea, use the status field to denote as to whether it was ‘Released’ or if you’re ‘Not Doing It’. That way, if someone comes up with a similar idea, they can see the fate of the previous one!
We’ve created a few default statuses for you, but you can change these as you see fit. Simply go to your ‘Account Settings’ and add or update the existing statuses to fit your workflow.

Head into your ProdPad account now and check it out. If you don’t have an account, then why not start your free trial today!

Agile Project Management with JIRA? Call for Beta Testers!

Are you using JIRA? We’d love to get you set up with our two-way JIRA integration, which allows you to map your statuses in ProdPad to those in JIRA. That way, your ProdPad account always reflects the latest status of all of your ideas.

The post Set a Status, Set a Course for Agile Project Management appeared first on ProdPad.

Why these integrations?

Our goal is to make the lives of Product Managers and their teams easier. We know that our users are already using a variety of project management, development management, and task management tools. ProdPad helps teams decide which projects or development tasks need to be worked on next, so it was a natural progression to allow an idea in ProdPad to be pushed directly to a project management tool so development can take it from there.

Transparency in Development

While the immediate benefit of these integrations means that you no longer need to manually copy over a finished spec from ProdPad into JIRA, Trello, or Pivotal tracker, it does more than that.

Your development team will always work best if they know why they are building out a specific feature. They need to know what problem they are solving, and what impact it’ll have on the company.

Because ProdPad pushes through a record of the product spec as well as a link back to the original idea, your developers using JIRA, Pivotal Tracker or Trello will be able to track back a request to it’s core. Who requested it (was it the CEO or a client?) and what was their original intention?

This will help ensure your devs are building the right thing and know who to ask if the spec isn’t clear.

Transparency in Business

Your sales team is a great source of new ideas, and so is your marketing team, your support team and even your CEO. However, when they tell you a great new idea, they usually have no way of knowing where it ended up.

With a direct integration set up, they can see whether it landed in Trello, JIRA, or Pivotal Tracker to be worked on by the development team, or whether it’s still sitting in ProdPad waiting for a little more feedback.

Keep your team in the loop from end-to-end by integrating ProdPad with your development tool.

What are you waiting for? Start your free trial today!

API and more integrations

While JIRA, Trello and Pivotal Tracker are our first direct integrations, we’re on the lookout for new integration ideas. Our API is being built out for developer access, and we’re open to suggestions on what else you’d love to see ProdPad integrated with.

Get in touch at hello@prodpad.com if you’ve got a particular integration in mind.

Using a different tool?

If JIRA, Pivotal Tracker and Trello aren’t your bag, don’t worry! We might already have you covered with our Zapier integration! Have a look at their full list of integrations available, now up to more than 240 3rd-party services you probably already use.

The post Integrate with JIRA, Trello, and Pivotal Tracker appeared first on ProdPad.

Project Management vs Product Management

Projects, by their very definition, have a distinct beginning, middle and an end. Projects get assigned a set of resources with which to complete the project. Each project has a well defined goal to be achieved at the end of the project. This makes it very easy to work out whether a project was successful. Did the project achieve the goal within the given constraints? If yes, it was successful and if no, it wasn’t.

Product management isn’t the same. It’s a discovery process as much as anything, and is unique from Project Management in a number of ways:

1. Product management doesn’t have any definite beginning, middle or end. Instead, product management is a cycle of continuous iteration, feedback and deployment. In fact, it isn’t really one cycle, but a series of cycles that orbit a vision and narrative of what the product is. These cycles cover aspects such as experimentation, usability testing, customer discovery, development and deployment of updates.
2. Product management is not a linear process, and the iterative processes involved actually encourage you to change tack on a pretty regular basis. Haven’t we all prioritised something up one development cycle only to drop it down the next cycle because new information suddenly made it less important? Or found that after digging into a certain problem to be solved we found that “must have” item was no longer so “must have”.
3. Product management doesn’t work within defined dates.  As much as our stakeholders would love us to agree to specific dates for those long-term roadmap items, it just doesn’t work that way – there’s too much to learn along the way, and therefore too much which can (and invariably will) change before we get there.Our approach at ProdPad was to build a roadmap tool that wasn’t constrained by dates.

This trend is worrying because shoehorning product management into a project management tool will only lead to poor practice. Product management is not just a set of tasks to be completed by various resources by certain dates. Things do not neatly move left to right in our world.

Any tool you use for product management should allow for non-linear processes and help with discovery.

This isn’t to say that a project management tool or a task manager cannot be used in some aspects of product management.  Once a product spec is ‘Go’, these tools can certainly help with development management, where you’ll have  defined resources, a goal and realistic timeline – this is why ProdPad integrates with these type of tools.   Where they fall short is in deciding which feature should be ‘Go’ in the first place!

Project management tools simply aren’t fit for purpose for managing the overall process of product management.

So to those of you product managers who are debating which tools to use for your day-to-day job, I say: Be a product manager, not a glorified Gantt chart jockey!

The post Don’t Use Project Management Tools For Product Management appeared first on ProdPad.