Product with multiple platforms

Question

Hi everyone!

I'm having trouble figuring out how to organize Epics on Jira so it aligns to my company's Product. We have 3 different levels to our platforms.

Whenever I create an Epic, it effects all three platforms in some sort of way. How do you manage your Epics so that when you create a new Epic, you are accounting for the effects it has on your other platforms?

For example a 4 level platform like eBay, they have

Portal for Ebay Employee
Portal for Ebay Sellers 
Website for customers
App for customers

When an Epic is added, wouldn't have an affect on all 4 platforms? How does a Product Manager have this complexity reflected on Jira?

Ste Wright · Accepted Answer

Hi @John Nguyen

This does depend on how work is structured within your company to some extent - for example...

* Is a product just a platform, and Epics cut across all platforms?
* Or is a product being worked on, and evolving always - up until decommissioning?
* Do teams work for one product, or is it cross-product - or both?

This will drive how you create your hierarchy of work in Jira.

It likely stretches wider than just the work hierarchy also, as you need to take into account how the teams work, how progress is reported, etc. I'd be looking at the overall structure in Jira, aligned to your ways-of-working.

As an example, if the products are platforms - you might...

* Create an Issue Hierarchy relevant to your team - for example...* Initiatives - large objectives (months/years)
* Epics - features to be delivered (weeks/months)
* Stories (days)

* Create Jira Projects...* One for Initiatives, as these could be cross-team
* One for each team itself

* Create a custom field to track Impacted Platforms - so you can see how the work each team is doing impacted the relevant platforms. Use this on all screens
* Use linked issues to show dependencies between teams - and in turn, dependencies between platforms, as you see how Story 1 is dependent on Story 2, etc

Or, perhaps the products are the large pieces of work - then you might modify the above, and have...

* A hierarchical level specific to the products, or related to specific project objectives
* Initiative-level projects might be split per product instead, to represent major areas of the business
* Impacted Platforms might not be needed as a field, as we could see the impacted Product from the Initiative parent
* Linked issues might be at multiple levels - i.e Objective 1 depends on Objective 2, or impacts Objective 3, etc

Note: If you're using Cloud, Jira Premium might be required if you'd benefit from additional hierarchical layers above Epic. See how these work on this help page.

Let us know your thoughts!

Ste