Where do PMs/POs spend most of their time

robert.nadon

Hi all,

As a partner I just came from a Jira Align overview presentation / demo and after showing the various parts of the tool (Program room, roadmap, program board, etc) I was asked "where would we be spending most of our time?".    

As a tech/partner, I understand the way the tools works and the various parts of it, but really do not know where a PM/PO would spend most of their time.  Also are their certain maps or reports you visit the most?

Thanks!

Robert

Derek Huether

As a former customer, I can say where I saw our people spending the most time. I saw Product Managers spend a lot of time looking at the (portfolio) backlog and the roadmap. The backlog was for intake, managing and maturing work. The roadmap was to see progress along timelines.  I saw Product Owners spending a lot of time on the (program) backlog, decomposing work from the portfolio backlog. Then a lot of time was spent on the program board, looking to see if any of their features were getting blocked by dependencies. 

The most common visual (report) I saw used was the PI Burndown. Specifically, PO's would drill down from a PI perspective down into the team view, versus going into Jira and clicking on all of the individual sprint reports (burndown).

The capability that paid for everything was orphan objects (in backlog). The Product Managers complained there was never enough capacity to deliver on their needs. They said we needed to hire 5 more teams, to the tune of $6M a year. We found out that a lot of work the teams were doing (in Jira) was not linked to Jira Epics and those Jira Epics were not linked to higher level commitments in Jira Align. Once the PM/POs realized this and they had the visibility of where capacity was going, we realized we had the capacity all along. Teams were just spending it on things that were not organizational priorities.