As a product manager, how often do you check JIRA board daily?

Mariam Matiashvili

What triggers you to check it: a follow-up email, Slack messages, the general roadmap, or a deadline? What do you primarily observe to get a response to your question? In my experience, I do this almost daily. It has become almost the main source of truth for me. We use Epics as projects. What has been your experience with this?

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Mariam Matiashvili -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

IMHO, this depends on the team and product owner's (PO) working methods...and the different scales at which you are looking for information.  As a PO, please consider what do you want to know, why that information, how would you want to see it / use it, and when do you need to know it?

For example...

• When a team uses mob programming, there is only one item in progress, and the product owner is actively working with the team at all times.  There are no "triggers" for when to check-in: everyone knows because they were "present", physically or remotely.
• When teams use pairing / or small group development, the daily standup (or scrum) may be sufficient for syncs and the Jira board, reports, and dashboards could supply larger contexts.  And certainly if the team is blocked, they will ping others including the PO for help.
• And then we have lone-wolf, silo-based methods.  These are the ones where progress may be unclear as a single person is less likely to update the Jira board as they work...perhaps only doing so immediately before (or during) a daily standup...if the team uses one.
• And so on...

Some of these can be supplemented using Jira Product Discovery, roadmaps / timelines, dashboards, and the Jira reports.  Again, please consider your and the team methods to consider what is helping and where things can be improved...and then discuss that with the team to define experiments to improve.

Kind regard,
Bill