Balancing Product Tracking, Development and Releases in Jira for small team

[Sophia]

Hello,

I’m looking for feedback on setting up a Jira organization for a platform product and engineering team.

We are a small SaaS company with 4 developers split across 2 teams (Core/Backend and Frontend). I act as both Product Owner and functional tester.

Some User Stories needs contributions from both teams simultaneously. Developers track their work through tasks and subtasks linked to User Stories, throug 2 dedicated boards (Scrum for core team, Kanban for front-end team).

We are trying to establish a simple setup that allows us to track product progress, team activity, PO validation, and deployments across environments.

In particular, I’m wondering how to draw the line between what should be represented through Jira workflows and what should instead be handled through boards, filters, custom fields, dashboards, or automation rules.

How do you distinguish development progress from delivery progress?

Do you include DEV → PREPROD → PROD stages directly in your workflows, or do you manage environment tracking differently? Does PO functional validation belong in the Story workflow, or is it handled through a separate process? At the moment, I have created a dedicated board with four statuses to track PO validation.

I’d be very interested in hearing how other small software or SaaS companies have approached this challenge while keeping Jira simple and avoiding unnecessary complexity.

Thanks for your feedback.