[CASE STUDY] How the Atlassian Creative Studio launched the largest Jira campaign to date
How do you collaborate with two external agency partners and a team of over a dozen creatives to launch the largest Jira campaign to date? Creative Producer @Melinda Michaud had to work with her teams to figure this out. Inspired by the campaign's message, “It starts with Jira,” Senior Program Manager Jesse Beckom and Marketing Program Manager @Monique Barreto helped the Creative Studio solve historical visibility issues by creating a Jira board. Read on to learn how they went from due to done in just 6 weeks.
Table of contents
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Step 1: Consider the needs of the campaign
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Step 2: Set up a source of truth
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Step 3: Establish ways of working
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Step 4: Decide on complementary tooling
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Step 5: Use powerful team rituals
Learnings and recommendations
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Nominate Jira champions to improve adoption
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Assign Jira setup to the right team members
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Use AI and integrations to bring your tools even closer together
Step 1: Consider the needs of the campaign
Atlassian’s Creative Studio regularly collaborates across teams and partners with external agencies to deliver world-class creative. “It starts with Jira” was poised to become the largest Jira campaign with hundreds of media placements. Melinda had already formally kicked off this campaign with key stakeholders, worked on discovery with her team, and moved into the planning stage.
For this project, the Creative Studio worked with two agency partners: one to support the awareness strategy, such as out-of-home advertising, and the other to help build out the paid media strategy. These agencies used Google Sheets to develop their media plans. Tracking this number of tasks clearly and cross-functionally, while providing status updates to stakeholders, would have been almost impossible. Not only that, but stakeholder teams were relying heavily on Slack to share information. For a campaign of this magnitude, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find documents and updates across channels and conversations.
The Creative Studio saw this as an opportunity to improve its working methods, and what better tool to use than Jira, the very subject of the campaign? The hope was to create a source of truth with:
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Clarity around task hierarchy and grouping
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Easy cross-linking to internal work items and status
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More streamlined project management across internal and external teams
Step 2: Set up a source of truth
”I’ve always been a fan of Jira, so using Jira for this campaign was a no-brainer for me. What got the team excited about using Jira was having a more centralized space that could easily break out work streams and track deliverables. It’s much less hectic.”
As long-time champions of Jira for complex marketing campaigns, Jesse and Monique were the perfect program managers to establish Jira as the source of truth. They created the boards each team would need to track their assets and linked these spaces. It was easy to give the agency partners the permissions they needed to collaborate with internal teams without sharing any proprietary data.
Jesse and Monique used the media plan that the agency partners had shared in Google Sheets to build out work types, which included:
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Epics: Each marketing channel (organic, out-of-home), which could break down into:
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Tasks: A distinct piece of work (an asset review)
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Deliverables: A tangible piece of work to deliver (a specific ad)
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Risks: Anything that may negatively impact the campaign (test timing, turnaround)
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Tasks, Deliverables, and Risks could have Sub-Tasks (an ad copy template)
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Within these work items, there were Labels for each team and agency partner, and Custom fields:
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Flight start date: When an asset was scheduled to launch - select date
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Flight end date: When a live asset was scheduled to be taken out of market - select date
These work items would then move through the custom Workflow: To do, In progress, Blocked, In review, Done, Canceled, Ready to traffic, In market
Now, the Creative Studio could break down the deliverables from their Confluence pages into Jira work items. Melinda used Rovo in Confluence to suggest work items from the project plans and to distill the creative brief into a summary for better project descriptions. This was much quicker than breaking down the work manually and ensured nothing was forgotten.
With the Jira board up and running with work items, Melinda could track ownership and progress across the work streams. She could see who was responsible for work items, their timeline, and their status. She also had a place to share updates, handoffs, and links with the cross-functional team. With Saved view, Melinda could always return to the exact list of projects she needed for the campaign, so she could find everything more easily.
Step 3: Establish ways of working
To ensure everyone understood the new ways of working, Jesse walked through the boards with internal teams and met with the agency partners in person to help them onboard. The key message was to keep everything important in Jira so that it stayed the source of truth and helped teams share and self-serve all the information they needed for the campaign.
Program management led weekly check-ins with the entire cross-functional team to see how the workflows were going on a day-to-day basis. Sharing the screen and walking through Jira helped create a forcing function for continued Jira usage and prevented the agency partners from reverting to Google Sheets.
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Summary shows recent updates, progress, and what’s due in the next seven days at a glance. This made it much quicker for the cross-functional team to determine what work was missing or at risk in advance.
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Filters also allowed the team to look into specific marketing channels and deliverables to track this huge campaign more easily. Wondering how the out-of-home ads were coming along? The team could zoom in on that channel.
Adopting new ways of working can be tricky, but after using Jira, the agency partners had excellent feedback and felt that the work went much smoother. Unlike Google Sheets, the Jira board was quick and easy to organize and understand, and information didn’t get lost the way it did with Slack.
When a deliverable was ready, the Creative Studio could post a comment on the work item so the entire team, including the external agency partners, got the update right away. Generative AI in the issue editor helped Melinda craft clear responses to teams and stakeholders and ensure alignment across work items.
“You have to use Jira to get the benefits of Jira.”
Step 4: Decide on complementary tooling
After implementing Jira and new ways of working with Program Management, the Creative Studio determined which tools to add to its tool stack to build on the collaboration with agencies and stakeholders. Based on their Jira integrations and ease of team use, they chose to Confluence, Loom, and Slack.
Confluence was already Melinda’s go-to tool for big-picture planning due to its visibility, but it was also helpful for tactical documentation, including:
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The creative brief: Created using a template and designed to align cross-functional teams
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The project plan: Detailed double-click planning moments in the creative workflow
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A breakdown of design specifications: Supported the complexity and variety of deliverables
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Copy development: Allowed copywriters and product marketers to collaborate and review asynchronously in a live doc and through comments
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Escalations: Helped the teams make key decisions fast with Atlassian plays and templates
These Confluence pages were linked in Jira. With the Suggest Confluence content feature, other relevant pages from across the organization were also captured in the work items, so team members didn’t have to worry about leaving out important context. Everyone on the campaign could see and even update all the documents without leaving the Jira board.
Loom was a great meeting alternative given how quickly the team needed to move. Instead of real-time meetings, the Creative Studio shared Looms that served as:
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Creative walkthroughs to share progress and updates
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Async creative reviews for stakeholders to comment on
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Pre-watches to share context or make decisions before meetings
Stakeholders could give feedback, ask questions, and have discussions directly within the tool, which meant that real-time meetings became much shorter and more productive.
Even during live Zoom calls, Loom still improved the Creative Studio workflows. The Loom AI Notetaker automated meeting notes and created action items for Melinda while she was focused on the conversations.
“Confluence and Loom offer bi-directional communication and you can link all the files in Jira, which is so helpful."
When you’re shipping hundreds of assets in such a short amount of time, you need more frequent touchpoints, and it isn’t always realistic to get everyone on a call or detail everything on a Jira work item. Although Slack was no longer the main source of project information, Melinda still used two channels for asynchronous communications:
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Creative channel: Instead of meeting every day for 15 to 30 minutes, the Creative team used a Slack thread to share their priorities in the morning and their progress at the end of the day.
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Stakeholder channel: Every Monday, Creative shared its weekly North Star with stakeholders to let them know what to expect for the week and whether there were any reviews coming up.
💡 Tip: Limit the number of Slack channels and conversations for each campaign to ensure key communication stays on Jira work items. If Slack is where your teams check for project notifications, install the Jira Slack app so they can see Jira comments and updates. You can learn how our Event Marketing team does this here.
Step 5: Use powerful team rituals
Your tooling can only take you so far, and at Atlassian, we strongly recommend bringing together the right products, people, and practices. For the Creative Studio, this meant combining Jira, Confluence, Loom, and Slack with rituals that supported the team.
The Creative Studio prioritized live daily jam sessions over standups that could easily take place asynchronously on Slack. In these jams, the Creative Director, designers, and writers got to collaborate on copy and design in real-time. This provided team members with a valuable opportunity to spar, problem-solve, and connect on the campaign, rather than work on individual contributions in a silo.
Optimizing calendars for focus time was another crucial aspect of the campaign, especially given the sheer number of deliverables. Melinda scheduled dedicated calendar blocks with the creative team each day so they could work without interruptions or the guilt of missing meetings. Protecting this time allowed team members to focus on their North Star for the day and work in a state of flow rather than trying to squeeze work into pockets of time throughout the day.
Learnings and recommendations
After successfully using Jira as the source of truth for their campaign, Melinda, Monique, and Jesse had three key takeaways:
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Nominate Jira champions to improve adoption. Teams find projects run much more smoothly with Jira, but they have to use it consistently to see the difference! Find a member of each stakeholder team who understands the value of a robust project management tool and can help promote consistent usage throughout your campaign.
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Assign Jira setup to the right team members. You may be lucky enough to have a Program Manager to help you create your Jira board, but make sure a subject matter expert (SME), such as a producer or project manager, is responsible for creating all the work items. This ensures work breakdowns reflect workflows, so teams can find and track deliverables easily.
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Use AI and integrations to bring your tools even closer together. Even with Jira as the source of truth, this huge campaign still required a ton of Slack conversations and Figma design mockups, which were often difficult to find and refer back to. Keeping everything together was critical for keeping teammates up to date. Fortunately, the Creative Studio could easily link Figma in Jira issues. But what about all the Slack pings? With Rovo, you can now turn Slack messages into Jira work items, which is something Melinda can’t wait to try on the next campaign to integrate the tooling and keep her teams updated.
Your turn
Check out our latest announcements from Team '25 to see how Rovo can help you streamline your move to Jira every step of the way.
Read more case studies on how our marketing teams use Jira and other Atlassian products.
Got questions for Melinda, Monique, and Jesse? Have recommendations from your own experience running a complex marketing campaign on Atlassian? Get the conversation started below! 👇
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Christa Parrish
About this author
Product marketing for Compass @ Atlassian
Atlassian
Mountain View, CA
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