[CASE STUDY] How Demand Generation at Atlassian joined partner teams on Jira to manage campaigns

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How do you get your team’s work tracking onto Jira when there’s already an existing ecosystem set up by partner teams? That’s the journey @Bonnie Jackson, Demand Generation Campaign Manager, and @Stephanie Tsingos, Demand Generation Strategist, took to make it easier to stay aligned.

Table of contents

Plugging into project management practices on Jira

• Step 1: Consider the scope and the stakeholders
• Step 2: Design your workflows
• Step 3: Customize your views
• Step 4: Establish consistent rituals

Learnings and recommendations

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Plugging into project management practices on Jira

“Jira doesn’t force a one-size-fits-all solution onto stakeholders — it provides the flexibility to work how individuals choose to work, while staying within a standardized project management framework.”

When Bonnie and Stephanie were looking for a work tracking solution to manage Demand Generation campaigns, they decided it was time for their team to join their partners like Email Ops on Jira. Not only would they start speaking the same language, but they would be leading by example for even more stakeholders to buy into this shared project management practice.

Step 1: Consider the scope and the stakeholders

Before making your grand entrance to Jira, it’s important to understand the current landscape. For the Demand Gen team, that was:

• Using Confluence for planning and team collaboration

• Working with multiple production-based teams using Jira Service Management for intake and Jira for project management

• Tracking individual project execution with no designated tool — every team member for themselves

Partner teams' projects were robust and customized for complexity, but Stephanie and Bonnie knew that with Jira, they didn’t have to copy their ways of working. They could start simple, building their own project however worked best for them. The key was making sure all the dependent work was cross-linked and visible across teams.

When starting the foundation, they kept two key elements top of mind.

• Scope: Which parts of the work will this project cover? Why is this project necessary? More broadly, how will Jira fit into the rest of our toolkit?

• Stakeholders: Who are the different people who will be interacting with this project? What level of visibility will they need? How do they prefer to receive information?

As far as scope, the Demand Gen team decided this Jira project would be specifically for campaign execution tracking. Strategic planning would continue to happen in Confluence and would just be referenced as Smart links in the project.

Stakeholders had three main roles: user, visibility-only, and external collaborator. For the external collaborators, the team would share reports and targeted views of the project.

Step 2: Design your workflows

Next, Stephanie and Bonnie started building the project. They decided to start with a blank template so they could create custom fields, workflows, and work types to align with the broader team’s processes and stakeholder handoffs.

More specifically, the work types became:

• Campaign launch (Emails, in-product messages, ads — anything that’s launched)

• Deliverable (Strategy pages, reporting, analysis — internal work)

• Investigation (Audience investigations, campaign experiments — anything ongoing internally)

Workflows included:

• For Campaign launches: To Do, Content Pending, In Build, Approved, Cancelled, Blocked, Launched.

  • These were based on each handoff stage with stakeholder team status. For example: Content Pending means “we’ve handed off the strategy page to the Product Marketing for content.” In Build means “we’ve handed the content onto the Email Ops team to build.”

• For Deliverables, Subtasks, and Investigations: To Do, In Progress, Blocked, Done

Custom fields were set as:

• Channel (drop down): where the message is being delivered

• Motion (drop down): which user goal the message is supporting

• Campaign Brief (URL): direct link to the brief

• Success Metric (open text field): the key performance indicator

The final piece the team needed was linking. Of course, since this project was being added to an existing ecosystem, linking work items to those happening in other teams' projects was critical. That way, Bonnie and Stephanie could maintain all the moving parts more easily because they were all linked to the campaigns they were tracking in their own space.

Plus, linking Confluence pages, Looms, and Figma files meant that all the information, updates, and asset designs were all in one place — no need to search for information again.

Step 3: Customize your views

From here, the foundation was ready for campaign tracking to begin. The team brought in all the pieces of work they had been tracking individually and started finding their favorite ways to use Jira.

Calendar view quickly became the overall preference because the nature of the work is very time-based, and the team could see what’s coming up soon — as well as what’s on the horizon — at a glance. Saved filters also came in handy right away, so every team member could look at the project the way they preferred.

Other views the team references often are List and Summary. With Summary, you can see what’s due soon, a breakdown of status, and recent activity in one snapshot. Click into the due soon section and you’ll get a custom list of all of the items that are due in the next five days. The completed section helps generate weekly roundups in a click. This view is a great snapshot to share with stakeholders.

After spending some time tracking work this way, the team noticed some repetitive, administrative tasks that kept coming up, which can only mean one thing: Automation time!

1. Automatically assign the Campaign Launch work type to the board owner.

2. Automatically create 3 subtasks for the Campaign Launch work type: Content, Audience, and Approvals.

3. Automatically update the subtasks with the linked work items, description, and campaign brief URL from the parent task to avoid going back and forth when looking for info.

4. Automatically notify team members via the Slack integration when updates are made to a work item they’re assigned to.

Taking advantage of Rovo is a time-saver too. A big favorite is creating automation rules using natural language. Suggest Confluence content is really helpful too, because it ensures that all relevant pages across the organization are captured in the work item (including pages they might not have even seen yet).

Step 4: Establish consistent rituals

Your project management tool can only support you as far as your rituals go. Without the clarity and shared understanding of how and why Jira should be used, it can become another chore to update instead of a core part of your workflow.

For the Demand Generation team, this meant assigning roles and responsibilities from day one. With Bonnie as the Campaign Manager, she was the designed Board Owner. Every day Bonnie goes in and checks what’s due today, what’s coming up this week, and what’s happening next week. Then, she flags outstanding deadlines with partners.

➡️ Up next: Bonnie will add automation rules to notify partner teams when campaign deadlines are coming up.

Having a quick view of recently completed tasks also means much less prep work for Bonnie to recap progress in wider team syncs.

Learnings and recommendations

After successfully moving over to Jira, Stephanie and Bonnie had 3 key takeaways:

1. Start with an MVP. Don’t overcomplicate your setup from the very beginning. It’s always better to start simple, with clear roles and responsibilities defined, and then add complexity as you need it.

2. Build workflows based on cross-functional handoffs. Use the broader team’s existing ways of working to your advantage.

3. Leverage different views for bring in new collaborators. Your Jira project isn’t just an internal to-do list. Share relevant views with your stakeholders (for example, by using Smart links to embed Jira views onto Confluence pages) to provide helpful context and generate interest for them to join you on the shared project management system.

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Got questions for Bonnie and Stephanie? Have recommendations from your own experience running demand generation on Atlassian? Get the conversation started below! 👇