[Live Session] Turning Team '25 News into Actionable Backlogs with Atlassian Rovo

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If you followed the excitement at Atlassian Team ’25 Europe, you heard a clear message: intelligent automation is here to stay (you can review the highlights from the keynote here).

We know Rovo is a universal teammate, but this article will focus specifically on how those innovations tackle the core issues faced by Product Owners and Managers every day. We're also hosting a live session with Atlassian expert on board, AI-Powered Software Lifecycle in Jira with Rovo, to show you how these new features fit directly into your daily world.

But why Product Owners? Because they are the key link between what customers want and what developers build. You set the goals, you structure the work and you own the project’s health. However, let's be honest, this important work can often feel slow and difficult due to manual processes. The big question we answer in this article is: Can Rovo really help you with your daily tasks in Jira, so you can focus on the biggest ideas and strategies? It all starts with making planning simple.

The Hidden Problem: Why Planning Takes Too Much Time

Product Owners (POs) should focus on strategy, but the daily tasks often get in the way. This slows down the whole team. The main problem is that big ideas (User Stories) must be turned into tiny, detailed tasks. This job, called story grooming, is manual, repetitive and carries major risks:

• You Lose Focus Time: Studies show that Product Owners spend more than 70% of their time on small, day-to-day tasks like writing tickets and updating details. This means less time for important things, like talking to customers and checking the market.

• The Team Gets Stuck: If a User Story isn't clear, developers have to stop and ask questions. This stopping and starting is inefficient and is a big reason why developers either misalign their coding-efforts or spend additional time on asking for details.

• Big Risks Are Missed: When you break down a project manually, it is easy to forget important tasks, like setting up security checks or data migration rules. If these are missed, they turn into expensive bugs later on.

The solution is clear: we must use intelligence to make the first step - planning - fast and strong.

Technical Insight: Atlassian Rovo Gets the Full Picture

Rovo's power to create good user stories comes from a strong technical base. For the POs, this means Rovo gives you proven information that simple AI tools cannot match.

The Context Connects Everything: The Atlassian Teamwork Graph

Rovo's intelligence depends on the Teamwork Graph. This data layer acts like a live map that connects people, documents and work across your entire system. This information is improved by Rovo Connectors, which pull data from outside sources like Google Docs, Slack and other tools.

• PO Value: For a Product Owner, this means Rovo can answer hard questions like, "What's the current status on the website redesign?" by pulling links and discussions from Confluence and Jira. This means the PO stops being a "data collector."

• Quality Input: The final quality of Rovo's work - including the user stories it creates - is directly linked to how much information it has. Rovo helps make sure the story you commit to is based on solid knowledge that already exists in your company.

Advanced Information Retrieval: Deep Research

Atlassian Rovo's Deep Research feature is the smart part that helps you discover new product ideas. It can handle big research requests (like checking what competitors are doing) by breaking the question into many smaller parts, searching for information, and putting the results into clear reports with sources.

• Strategic Shift: This ability completely changes the PO's job from being a researcher to being a strategist. Rovo instantly finds the proof you need (customer thoughts, market facts) to back up a user story, helping you commit to the right work based on facts.

The Final Step: Making the Content Correct

When you use Rovo to write a story in Jira, your job as the PM is not to just let the AI write everything, but to use it as a smart tool to check your process. This means giving Rovo clear rules to make sure the story meets your team's Definition of Ready (DoR). The value is not just in creating text, but in creating correct, complete text very quickly.

What a Rovo-Ready Story Must Include

The ultimate goal is to generate an AI-structured backlog. This requires the Product Owner to provide rich, structured input for the AI to process. To ensure that Rovo generates a structurally sound Epic and complete sub-tasks, your User Story documentation must contain these contextual elements:

1. Core Goal (The "What" and "Why"): The traditional format that defines the user, the goal and the ultimate benefit.

2. Explicit Acceptance Criteria (The "Must-Haves"): Clear, measurable success conditions that define functional completeness.

3. Non-Functional Requirements (The Hidden Scope): Crucial notes on performance, compliance, or logging. This prompts Rovo to generate the necessary NFR Subtasks (e.g., All transactions must meet ISO-27001 logging standards).

4. Integration Points (The Technical Links): Explicit mention of systems that need touching (e.g., Requires connection to the legacy authentication service).

The Bird's-Eye View: Once this rich context is supplied, the AI instantly yields a structurally sound project architecture. The system automatically organizes the work into critical paths (Frontend, Backend and Validation), ensuring a consistent starting point for all downstream teams and significantly reducing the time spent in follow-up clarification meetings.

Reclaiming Your Leadership

Using Atlassian Rovo in the planning phase immediately delivers two major wins:

• You Save Time: The hours you used to spend writing and reviewing task lists are given back to you. You can now use this time for strategic work: talking to customers, checking the market and planning the future of your product.

• Your Project is Safer: Rovo automatically checks for those critical tasks that people often forget, making your project much safer from major bugs later on.

This strong planning creates a smooth road for the rest of the team. That clear, structured plan is the perfect fuel for the Rovo Dev Agent to write code. However, planning is only the first step. To ensure you can successfully apply these methods, we will be sharing practical tips on crafting and dividing user stories with Rovo. And the next natural question is: How does that system handle the coding and quality gates? We will answer all of that by showing you the full cycle live in our upcoming webinar.

Next Steps

The goal of the Atlassian Rovo AI workflow is simple: to help you do your best work by automating the tiring, repetitive tasks. For Product Owners, this means you can stop worrying about the tactical details and take back your true job: leadership and strategy.

We invite you to join us to see the full system in action.

Deepen your understanding of AI-Powered Planning and see the full Software Development Lifecycle demonstrated live.

Register for the session on November 18th: AI-Powered Software Lifecycle in Jira with Rovo