❤️ How Jira (and One App) Saved My Relationship
Hello everyone, my name is Mark.
I'm a software developer from Europe, and for the past three years, I've been in a relationship with my girlfriend, Jess. For a long time, everything was wonderful. But then, almost without me noticing things began to change.
My professional life runs on sprints, two week cycles, daily stand ups, and a constantly evolving backlog. Yet, my personal life never received the same level of care and attention.
Slowly, Jess began to feel like one more part of my life I kept putting off for later. I kept making promises - planning a weekend away, fixing that shelf, cooking a meal togetherbut these tasks never seemed to make it to "Done."
I was always saying, "I'll get to it later." Eventually, she reached her limit. She told me she was tired of waiting for a "later" that never came. And then, she left 😢
A Painful Wake-Up Call
The week after she left was one of the hardest I've experienced. I wasn't just heartbroken, I was angry with myself. How could I manage intricate software systems with ease, yet fail so completely at managing the thing that mattered most?
During a long, honest night of self reflection (I suppose you could call it a personal retrospective), a idea struck me.
It wasn't about turning my relationship into a mechanical process, but about applying the principles that make projects successful: clarity, commitment, and follow through.
I thought, "What if I treated rebuilding our relationship like the most important sprint of my life?"
That's how the "Relationship Sprint" was born.
Building Our "Us" Project
I opened Jira, but this time instead of a work project, I created a new one and simply called it "Us."
I defined issue types that reflected our life:
- Promise: For the things I had said I would do, like booking a trip or cooking her favorite dinner.
- Ritual: For the small, daily routines we valued, such as an evening walk or a Friday night movie.
- Talk: For the important conversations we had been putting off, about finances or our future.
- Date: For dedicated time to reconnect, like going out for dinner or having a board game night.
I set up a straightforward two week sprint. The goal to rebuild trust and connection. To help me stay honest and consistent, I used the Sprint Health Analyzer app from my work toolkit. Its Agile charts gave me a clear, visual way to track my progress.
A Shared Experiment
When I worked up the courage to ask Jess for another chance, I explained my plan. "Give me two weeks," I said. She thought it was a little crazy, but she was willing to try.
Here’s how it worked in practice:
We Planned Together. On a Sunday evening we sat down and built our sprint backlog together. We chose about twenty items, a mix of chores, dates and meaningful conversations. We even used story points to size them (because honestly, a deep clean of the apartment definitely feels like a 5-pointer).
I Tracked My Commitment. Each morning with my coffee, I would glance at the BurnDown chart. Watching that line go down became a small, personal motivation. After a few days the Velocity report showed something powerful, I was consistently delivering on my word. For the first time in a long while, my promises were turning into action.
We Celebrated the Small Wins. The BurnUp chart became my favorite view. It visually represented all we had accomplished. Seeing tickets like "Cook dinner together" and "Movie night" stack up in the "Done" column made us both feel that we were actively building something positive, piece by piece.
What the Charts Really Measured
The metrics took on a new, deeper meaning in this context:
Velocity was no longer about productivity, but about emotional reliability. Was I doing what I said I would?
BurnDown showed not just unfinished tasks, but the weight of unresolved promises.
BurnUp visualized our progress, representing the steady growth of trust through small consistent wins.
Blocked Issues were rarely about time, they were about conversations I was avoiding. The chart forced me to see my own patterns of avoidance and address them sooner.
The Retrospective
After two weeks, we held our relationship retrospective.
(Yes, I even printed out the board for us to look at.)
We talked and we reflected. Jira itself hadn't fixed anything. The magic was in the intentionality it inspired. It gave us a shared framework a language of structure, visibility and progress that we both understood.
Our relationship improved because I became more reliable. The frustration faded because we were communicating clearly. We learned to plan our life together with empathy and rhythm much like a healthy team.
Jira was never designed for matters of the heart. But it can be a powerful mirror for how we handle our commitments. The Sprint Health Analyzer showed me more than data, it revealed my own patterns of overcommitment and avoidance and highlighted how small wins can build into something substantial.
P.S. As I am unable to publish this story in the Atlassian Community myself, I have reached out to the developer of the Sprint Health Analyzer app, who has kindly agreed to share it on my behalf.
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Maksym Babenko_TypeSwitch_
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