Jira Product Catalogue

Rich Angell

We use Jira extensively to deliver Products, 100-150 small/ medium sized Products within a Programme of work managed under a single Jira Project, owned by multiple Product Owners.

Our delivery currency is in Epics, initially there being a 1-1 relationship between Products and Epics but as the Products have evolved this has become a 1 to many relationship between Products and Epics  for example a Product may be created from a combination of distinct and common components. So:

 Product A

- Epic 1

- Epic 2

- Epic 3

Product B

- Epic 1

- Epic 4

- Epic 5

This plays into our delivery approach which is not as agile as we would like , where gaining business acceptance of individual Epics and not the Product as a whole is challenging and by maintaining a 1-1 relationship between Epic and Product (which we have tried) results in very large Epic’s which often become bottomless pits of new functionality that can never be closed.

In Summary: Is there any way to manage delivery by Product in Jira, there not being a Product Issue type in Jira - should there be one? is there any other integrated tooling that could be used (Not confluence due to the maintenance overhead) ?

Judd Garratt - Path of Trees

Hi Rich!

One potential way to solve is is by using Advanced Roadmaps which provides issue hierarchy above the epic level. In your situation you could create a 'Product' issue type and set this as the issue level above epic, providing a better grouping mechanism. If you need to group epics under a product, you could also add additional levels e.g. Product -> Legend -> Epic -> Story. The Advanced Roadmaps docs have instructions on adding to the issue hierarchy.

Advanced Roadmaps might also give you a way to split up your various products into a few Jira projects to more easily manage these (as it can sit across the top of multiple projects).

Could be worth a try