Your Jira Epics Are Lying to You: A Radical Guide to Value-Driven Management

[#1]

Epics are supposed to be our big-picture items, the way we group related work and get a high-level view of what's coming. That's the textbook definition, and on paper, it sounds great.

But here's my honest take: too often, we've gotten it wrong. We've taken this powerful tool – the Jira Epic – and turned it into a dumping ground. It's become a convenient place to stick a bunch of tasks, even if they don't truly connect to one big, clear goal. This doesn't just make our backlog messy; it hides the real value we're trying to create and, frankly, gives us a false sense of progress. We might look busy, but are we actually moving the needle?

So, this isn't going to be your typical "how to click the 'create epic' button" guide – because frankly, you don't need me for that. You already have ChatGPT. Our goal? To cut through the noise, make every Epic truly count, and deliver real, undeniable impact for your projects.

The Problem: Epic Graveyard and The Illusion of Progress

So, if our Epics aren't always working for us, what's actually going wrong?

1. Epics Become Just… Folders

We've all been there. You have a bunch of related-ish tasks, and you need a place to put them. "Aha! An Epic!" you think. But before you know it, that Epic becomes a glorified digital folder. We start dumping any vaguely connected story or task into it, purely for convenience. The problem? When an Epic becomes just a big bucket, it loses its meaning. It stops being a strategic initiative and starts being just a messy container, making it impossible to see the real plan. There's no clear story, no unified goal – just a collection of stuff.

2. Zombie Epics

Then there are the "Zombie Epics." These are the ones we started with good intentions. Someone said, "Let's create an Epic for X!" and we did. But then, it never got properly defined. We didn't set clear goals, didn't really track its progress, and certainly never finished it. These Epics just linger in our backlog, taking up space, cluttering our view, and consuming our mental energy. They're not active, but they're not gone either – a constant reminder of unfinished business.

3. The Activity Trap

Look, we're all busy. Our Jira boards often show a flurry of activity, and we might have a long list of "active" Epics. But here's the tough question: “Is all that activity actually leading to meaningful value?” A long list of open Epics can create a dangerous illusion of progress. We might feel productive because things are moving, but if those Epics aren't tied to clear strategic outcomes, we're just spinning our wheels.

4. The Stakeholder Disconnect

And what about our stakeholders – the people who rely on us for results? We show them our Jira hierarchy, our Epics, our Stories. But often, it's just noise to them. They don't care about our internal Jira setup; they care about business outcomes. They want to know: "What problem did we solve?" "How did this improve things for our customers?" When our Epics are poorly defined or treated as folders, we fail to translate our work into a language that matters to them, leading to frustration and a lack of understanding.

All of this isn't harmless. There are real costs involved:

• Wasted Effort: teams spending time on things that don't truly contribute to a strategic goal.
• Demoralized Teams: uncertainty about what's truly important, leading to burnout and a feeling of being busy without purpose.
• Unclear Priorities: if every Epic is "important," then no Epic truly is.
• Inability to Adapt: a messy backlog with ill-defined Epics makes it much harder to pivot quickly when priorities inevitably change.

It's clear we need a better way. 

3 Key Principles to Build Epics for Value, Not Folders

Now, how do we fix these problems? It starts with a big shift in how we think about Epics: 

Principle 1. Define Value First – Your Epic is a Hypothesis, Not a Shopping List

Too often, we create an Epic, give it a simple title like "Website Redesign," and then just start piling stories into it. There's no clear, measurable goal upfront, no testable idea about why we're doing this or what success looks like. This is a recipe for scope creep and Epics that never truly feel "done."  

Every Epic should start with a clear question: "If we do X, do we believe it will achieve Y value for our customers or our business?" It's a structured guess, an experiment, a commitment to solving a specific problem and delivering a measurable outcome.

* Jira Tip: add custom fields to Epics that explain the value hypothesis (e.g. "By revamping the user dashboard with personalized widgets for recent activity status and access settings, we hypothesize a 15% increase in daily active users and a 20% reduction in customer support inquiries related to navigation, ultimately leading to higher feature adoption and customer satisfaction").  Also, add a custom fields for success metrics, target outcome, and stakeholders.

Principle 2. Link with Intent – Stories are Experiments, Not Just Tasks Under an Epic

It’s easy to just throw any story that's vaguely related into an Epic. But if we're treating Epics as value hypotheses, then every single story we link to it should be a deliberate, focused step toward validating that hypothesis or delivering a piece of its stated value. If a story doesn't clearly contribute to the Epic's Success Metrics, it probably doesn't belong under that Epic. It's either an unrelated task, or our Epic itself isn't well-defined.

Principle 3. Declare Victory (or Defeat) – The Epic Has a Defined End State

This is probably the most common epic failure point. Epics often become "eternal." We keep adding new work, new stories, new ideas, and they just never truly get done. This isn't just bad for tracking; it kills team morale because we never celebrate a true win. It also hides our real achievements and keeps our backlog messy.

* Jira Tip: instead of just "To Do," "In Progress," "Done," consider statuses that highlight value validation:

• To Do: defined, but not started.
• In Progress & Iterating: actively working on stories, validating the hypothesis.
• Validating Value (A/B Testing & Feedback): the work is "built," now we're measuring the actual impact against our Success Metrics.
• Done - Value Achieved: our hypothesis was proven, and we delivered the expected value. Time to celebrate!
• Archived - Hypothesis Disproven: we ran the experiment, and the value wasn't achieved, or the hypothesis was wrong. This is still a valuable outcome – we learned something!

Reporting: Dashboards for Outcomes, Not Just Completion Rates

We've talked about creating and managing Epics with a value-driven mindset. But what good is all that if we can't show the real impact? 

Default Jira reports are fine for seeing how many issues we've closed or how fast we're burning down tasks. But frankly, they don't tell the full story. They focus on outputs. We need to shift our focus to outcomes – the actual value delivered and the impact made. That's what stakeholders truly care about.

* Jira Tips:

1. Start by creating powerful Jira filters. These will be the foundation of your reports. You can filter for Epics that are active, tied to specific strategic goals, or still awaiting validation. For example: issuetype = Epic AND "Epic Status" != "Done - Value Achieved" AND "Epic Status" != "Archived - Hypothesis Disproven" ORDER BY created DESC. 
2. Now, use those filters to populate your dashboards with gadgets that actually show value:
   • Use Filter Results Gadget to display a list of your key active Epics. Make sure the columns show your custom fields like Value Hypothesis, Success Metrics, and Target Outcome so everyone instantly sees the "why."
   • Two Dimensional Filter Statistics is great for visualizing progress across different dimensions. You could track Epics by Stakeholder (who owns the outcome?), by Value Stream, or by custom labels to see where value is being created.
   • Create specific burn-ups or burn-downs for the stories under a particular Epic. This helps us see if we're on track to deliver that Epic's specific value, not just busy overall.
   • Tools like Confluence can pull in Jira data to create more comprehensive reports, and business intelligence (BI) dashboards can connect to Jira to visualize actual business impact data alongside our Epic progress.

Prioritization Beyond Drag-and-Drop

Simply dragging and dropping items in a backlog isn't enough for strategic Epics. True prioritization is an ongoing process of re-evaluating our Epics against the current strategic landscape, our capacity, and the market. It’s about asking, "Is this still the most valuable thing we could be working on?"

* Jira Tips:

1. Use labels to tie your Epics to broader company goals or strategic themes. This helps you quickly see what's aligned to "Grow Market Share" versus "Improve Customer Retention."
2. Get comfortable with JQL (Jira Query Language). You can craft powerful queries to surface Epics based on urgency, estimated impact (using a custom field if you score them), and current team capacity. This helps you identify the true "next best" Epic, not just the oldest one.
3. We should schedule regular "epic pruning" or "re-prioritization" sessions – at least quarterly. Use tools like Planyway for Jira to visualize your Jira Epics on a roadmap view. This visual representation is crucial because it allows the entire team to see the interconnectedness of Epics, understand dependencies, and grasp the bigger picture. If the market has shifted, if the hypothesis is no longer valid, or if a more urgent opportunity has emerged, the roadmap provides the holistic view needed to be ready to pivot, pause, or even abandon an Epic. It's okay to stop if it's no longer the best path to value, and a well-maintained roadmap makes those strategic decisions clear and justifiable to all stakeholders.

Conclusion

Treating Epics as strategic value hypotheses, rather than just convenient organizational containers, fundamentally transforms our Jira instance. It shifts it from being just a task tracker into a powerful engine for strategic execution and genuine value delivery. We stop focusing on checking boxes and start focusing on making a real difference.

[Violetta]

This really made me rethink how we’ve been treating Epics — especially the part about using them as "value hypotheses" instead of just task buckets. Love that framing. Quick question: how do you handle cross-cutting work that touches multiple Epics but doesn’t clearly belong to just one? For example, platform updates or infrastructure improvements that support many product areas — they don’t always tie neatly to a single value hypothesis, but they’re still critical. Do you treat these as their own Epics with a broader hypothesis, or handle them completely differently? Would love to hear your take. This is one of the places where our clean “strategic Epics” model starts to break down.

[Mary from Planyway]

@Violetta 

For cross-cutting work (like platform upgrades, infra changes, shared libraries, etc.), here’s the key: just because the work is technical doesn’t mean it can’t have a value hypothesis. The mistake is thinking: “This supports many things, so it’s not tied to one outcome”. But value can still be defined — it just might be indirect. Here's how I usually approach it:

Option 1: treat it as its own Epic — but with a clear enabling value hypothesis

Example: “If we refactor the notification service, teams will ship notification features 25% faster, enabling faster time-to-market for key customer flows”. That’s real, testable value. It’s not just “cleaning up tech debt”. It’s accelerating product delivery or reducing long-term costs. You’re still making a bet — and you can still validate that bet post-implementation.

Option 2: don’t make it an Epic at all — track it as a cross-epic initiative or use labels

Some work really is foundational and doesn’t benefit from the same Epic structure. In these cases, I often:

• Use a custom label like platform or shared_infra
• Link issues to multiple Epics using the “relates to” field (or use issue linking + automation)
• Track the initiative outside of Jira Epics entirely — easy with Planyway roadmap tool or Confluence doc with links to all associated work

What I don’t recommend: forcing it into an Epic just to stay “organized.” That’s how you end up with Zombie Epics or ones with no clear definition of done. At the end of the day, not every piece of work needs to be an Epic, but every Epic should have a defined outcome.

Curious how others are handling this — hybrid models? Tags? Tech OKRs? This is where things get really interesting. 

[Dan Iwire]

@Mary from Planyway 

Thanks for the article, Mary! Finally, someone is saying what we've all been thinking regarding epics. There are actually too many How-to guides here in Community but it's always great to read real thoughts and see real use-cases rather than "click here and you create an epic". 

My biggest challenge with this is often getting buy-in, especially from some team members who are used to the "folder" approach. Do you have any specific strategies or examples of how you introduce this  concept to a team that's resistant to change, or how you onboard them to actually use those new value-driven custom fields?

Thanks!

[Mary from Planyway]

@Dan Iwire 

It's great to hear that the article resonated with you! 

Your question about teams ingrained in the "folder" mentality is probably the most common hurdle.

Here are a few strategies I suppose to be effective:

• Don't try to roll this out across every Epic in your entire organization at once. Pick one new, mid-sized project or even just one key Epic where you have a bit more control or a team that's open to experimentation. For that pilot, run it with the new hypothesis-driven approach. Then, after a few sprints, compare its clarity, focus, and measurable outcomes to a "folder-style" Epic from another area or an older one. When teams see the difference in clarity and how much easier it is to articulate value, it often sparks curiosity.
• Instead of just creating the custom fields and telling them to fill it out, make the initial population of the "Value Hypothesis" and "Success Metrics" a collaborative workshop. For a new Epic, lead the team through a discussion: "What problem are we trying to solve here? For whom? What would success look like if we solved it? How would we know?" Write their ideas directly into those fields.
• If you have a supportive stakeholder who is frustrated by the lack of clarity on outcomes, bring them into the pilot. Show them how the new fields for "Value Hypothesis" and "Success Metrics" immediately answer their "why" questions. Their positive feedback can be a powerful driver for team adoption.

Hope some of these ideas help you out!

[Violetta]

@Mary from Planyway 
That makes a ton of sense — I really like the idea of reframing even infrastructure work as enabling bets. I think we’ve been a bit lazy about that, treating “tech work” as inherently exempt from value framing. Definitely going to try applying that mindset in our next planning cycle.

[Evgeniya Zemlyanskaya]

You mentioned defining value first and using custom field for a value hypothesis and success metrics. Could you give a more detailed example of how you'd structure  "Value Achieved" status? What kind of information would you expect to see there to confidently declare victory, beyond just hitting some numerical metrics? I'm curious about the qualitative aspects of validation. 

[Mary from Planyway]

@Evgeniya Zemlyanskaya 

Here is what I think may help:

1. Before declaring victory, we revisit why this Epic existed in the first place. That means pulling in the original Value Hypothesis and Success Metrics custom fields. Example:

Hypothesis: By introducing personalized widgets on the dashboard, we believed we could increase DAUs by 15%, reduce nav-related support tickets by 20%, and improve feature adoption.

This sets the benchmark. Now we assess what actually happened.

2. Of course, you want to show whether you hit the numbers. But don’t just paste metrics — interpret them.

Actuals:

• DAUs increased by 18%

• Support tickets dropped only 8%

• Feature adoption increased 30%

Interpretation: While adoption and DAUs exceeded targets, the reduction in support tickets underperformed. Interviews revealed that while navigation improved, users still struggled with account-level settings, which weren’t addressed in this Epic.

3. Time for qualitative insights which is the part most teams miss. Value isn’t just data — it’s experience. Include things like:

• Quotes from user interviews or NPS responses.

• Summaries of usability testing.

• Feedback from customer support teams or field sales.

4. Did your stakeholders feel the value? This kind of feedback helps you understand if what you built truly aligned with business goals.