The Master Model (Connecting Everything): JPD vs Jira Software vs Atlas Projects & Goals vs Releases

[Jonathan Prisant]

I'm so excited about how many disparate products & functionality are converging across the Atlassian stack to empower organizations across multiple all the different context, stakeholders, teams, and levels. 

The big question at the end of this 

There is almost a light at the end of the tunnel for decreasing duplication, increasing alignment, increasing simplicity, and all the other important corporate efficiency and effectiveness scaling buzz-phrases. 

Atlassian Projects as a central source of general information for anyone with all the contextual meta, views, and updates.

• Linking Epics for synchronized dates & meta. = Wahoo

Atlassian Goals (still trying to figure this out at our org) for simple visibility, updates, and OKRs.

Jira Product Discovery  for the micro (ideas) and macro (executive visibility) + JPD Roadmaps. 

• Calculated Date fields = Wahoo!
• Teams field = Wahoo!
• Types = Wahoo!
• Connections = Wahoo!
• Linked Atlas Projects & Goals = Wahoo!

Jira Software and Jira Plans for where the operational delivery / execution and resource allocation occurs. 

Best Practice Framework +/- How Does Atlassian Work?

There are several critical opportunities and realities of duplication that seems to have an exponentially destructive outcomes of unnecessary confusion, ineffectiveness, and inefficiency. 

Dates... so many dates +/- automations to try and do some of the work. (Again, yay for JPD's calculated Date field!)

• Planned vs. Actual across multiple stages of the delivery life cycle.
• Beta, GA ... +/- agile delivery and descoped delivery for more frequent, iterative value drops for increased velocity and customer feedback.
• Somehow CI/CD fits in here

Themes, Initiatives, Features, Releases, Goals, Business / Product Outcomes, etc... For moderately sized organizations with dozens of engineering teams and multiple product groups... and lots of corporate jargon groupings that bleed over each other AND tooling.

• Jira Software Premium work item hierarchy
• Jira Product Discovery types & connections
• Atlas Projects & Goals 

Tools empower process. When process isn't clear, tooling reflects that... and increases the convolution. When you add in corporate mergers + Atlassian cloud migrations, different and unclear ways of working, and inconsistent or overlapping tool usage... whew. Further, sometimes you have to modify ideal process (if it is even defined) to fit within limitations of tool functionality. 

A plethora of stakeholders and contexts.. executives, directors + managers within and across departments, engineering groups / teams, product groups / teams, product trios, and so much more.

🫠 Getting to my actual question (thanks for bearing with me!)... I've frequently consume webinars, actively read multiple community group posts, regularly reference the best-in-class Jira Product Discovery Handbook [and have promoted it across all our product groups].. and so much more. 

I understand this is inherently complex... and the foundation of Atlassian and many other company's offerings. 

❓What is the high-level framework for how  Atlassian internally contextualizes, connects, and structure the different entities across the products?

• Themes & Initiatives... what do these higher level look like and what is the context for what the represent? Where do entities live across products, for whom + in what context, and how are they connected?
• When and how is what [purposefully] duplicated across JPD, Jira Software, and Atlas Projects & Goals?

The JPD Manual lightly touches on Atlas Projects & Goals... and was created before JPD Types & Connections. The manual also doesn't provide context for how JPD may / may not align with Jira Software Premium deeper work item hierarchies. (This isn't a criticism!) 

I appreciate there is only so much that can be shown, but In some of the webinars the screen-shares look aspirational and sterilized... it just looks too clean vs. my experience at every company I've ever worked with 😄. 

I understand this is a complex question, but I'm curious if @Tanguy Crusson or someone else can offer more context. 

Hopefully this makes sense!