What are your best practices for designing Jira workflows that balance flexibility and clarity?

[Jesse Hilton]

How do you design Jira workflows that don’t become overly complicated, but still let teams work the way they want?

[Mario GELES]

Hi @Jesse Hilton ,

I think the first thing is to talk with the team to clearly understand their process and needs. After this talk you have to be able to draw the process on your own (for example on draw.Io with BPMN template) if not so you know the process is still unclear for you.

For me the first version of the workflow should be the simplier the team's process allow you. It's easy to add complexity or automations but it would be more difficult to simplify what you first made.

Then you just have to wait for team's feedback and adjust your workflow with it.

I hope this will help you,

Best regards,
Mario

[Aaron Williams]

Great answer! I also find, that letting them use their own words to describe "Statuses" works well, and then you translate it back to cross functional statuses and explaining how they relate back to what they have said.