How our Head of Program Management relies on Jira Product Discovery for portfolio management

[#1]

Hi Community! This week as part of Jira Product Discovery June, we’ll be sharing examples of how different Atlassians use Jira Product Discovery. This is part 1 of 4.

✨ Challenge ✨

We want to hear from you too! Leave a comment with any questions, tips, or how you use Jira Product Discovery within your team and get the Planning Pathfinder badge.

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*This spotlight highlights Jira Product Discovery Premium - learn more here.

Meet the Atlassian

• Name: @Ashoke Chakrabarti 

• Role: Head of Program Management, Work Management for All

• Where you’re from: Los Angeles, CA

• Fun fact: Big cat guy

• Advice as a PgM: Focus on learning as you go. Try to iterate and adjust as you go.

1. What team are you on at Atlassian and what is your team responsible for?

I’m on the Work Management for All group. We build productivity and knowledge tools for all customers and in particular, we focus on bringing Confluence, Trello, and Loom to the people.

2. What challenges was the Work Management team facing that prompted adopting Jira Product Discovery?

We have a big organization (~1000+ people) across multiple products, programs, projects, initiatives, and teams. We needed a way to see what all of our groups and teams were working on, what their capacity was, and the option for both a high level and detailed view of roadmaps across those teams. Jira Product Discovery was the solution that presented a way to pull all that information together and manipulate it for different audiences.

3. What are the primary ways in which the Work Management team uses Jira Product Discovery?

Work Management’s Jira Product Discovery board is a canonical source of truth for everything in our org. We use it for a few key use cases:

• Project planning: we use Jira Product Discovery to evaluate the projects across each team, their phases, and rank them accordingly

• Headcount planning: Jira Product Discovery has a number of formulas and functions that enables teams to do project estimation and map those estimates to the headcount we have available to do work. From here, we can reconcile staffing needs and make adjustments as needed.

• Roadmapping for other parts of our organization: other teams we work with need insight into our roadmap. For marketing, sales, or other departments, we can customize roadmap views with fields to enable our partners to see when major projects are being delivered.

4. How has adopting Jira Product Discovery helped support your team’s way of working?

We've seen two main benefits:

• Better visibility and collaboration with other teams (e.g leadership, marketing, sales, etc)

• More productive meetings around team bandwidth and capacity for initiatives on our roadmap

5. Any pro tips or advice to share as a Jira Product Discovery power user?

Leverage it as a foundational toolset that lets you build a rich dataset for your team. Connecting Jira Product Discovery with Jira, Projects/Goals, and other tools, you can gain valuable insight into your team’s operations and how it’s executing. It’s a great roadmapping tool for the future.

Demo

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In case you missed them, here the other articles in this series:

• Part 2: How Jira Program Managers use Jira Product Discovery for design allocation and capacity planning
• Part 3: How Atlassian's Growth team uses Jira Product Discovery for program planning and execution

[Katrin Erhardt]

Hello @Kesha Thill , thank you very much for the exciting insights into your daily business. I personally find it particularly exciting that you also map your (high-level) capacity planning in JPD. Is there by any chance an article or a video with more insights into how you plan your resources (e.g. which fields and formulas are relevant from your point of view for generic resource planning)?

[Yiling Baldez]

This video was incredibly insightful to see how the WM team uses JPD! Thank you for sharing.

A few questions:

1. What kind of tickets are Milestones in that view? Are they Jira or a JPD type in the same JPD project?

2. How does the team decide which fields should be global fields and what is the governance workflow?

3. Does the team use any mechanism to track dependency requests and if so, how? 

Thank you!

[Ashoke Chakrabarti]

hi there! Ashoke here =) a few answers! 

HC capacity: we simplified this to capture team names and the developer weeks needed and allocated each quarter. gives us a way to see how we're spending our time. 

milestones are just jira tickets we use for tracking. you can create a project in jpd but we use jira for tracking the specific eng work/deliverables. linking here gives us a view of both the project and it's deliverable. 

global fields are determined at the company level. we have a bunch we use. the governance of this is distributed across teams/individuals with the intention of building a shared view of the top projects and work. product, eng, design, program managers, all contribute. 

dependencies are manages through the milestones we set up in jira tickets. that way, we know what work has dependent work from other teams. 

Happy to answer other questions as well! 

[Kesha Thill]

@Katrin Erhardt @Yiling Baldez see Ashoke's responses above! 

@Katrin Erhardt - making a note of your request for more support on resource planning / demos. I can put together a quick demo to highlight a few ways to do resource planning, but in the meantime, this demo may help for a very high-level method using tshirt sizing, and this blog (#2 specifically) also provides an example!

[Katrin Erhardt]

@Ashoke Chakrabarti @Kesha Thill thank you for your quick response and the offer to put together a short demo - that would be super helpful!

[Tomislav Tobijas]

We're preparing to research how we could switch the idea management from the software Jira project to JPD for one of our clients. 👀

Meanwhile, we still use JPD internally for tracking movie ideas 😄🎞️

Thanks for sharing this use case! Quite insightful :)

[David Vilarino]

We were using confluences for planning. Now, JPD is the only way. 

[Harrison Ponce]

Thanks @Ashoke Chakrabarti for showing your team's use-case!!

One question for ya:

1. Most everything seems to be an idea work type in your JPD. The fact that there are only ideas stopped us from expanding JPDs use as it would muddy what an idea is and confuse our folks. But now with JPD Premium, they have introduced the ability to have other types. Is this something you envision taking advantage of?

[Hana Kučerová]

Thank you for sharing your use-case.

[Kate]

Very interesting presentation - definitely challenged my way of thinking about JPD.

[Sherry_Xie]

Nice to know it can be used as a road mapping tool 👍