Scrum organization for several products at the same time

Alexandre Prezio

Hello,
I'm in the middle of thinking about a new organization for our company. We're integrating the Atlassian stack more and more and I'd like to build a solid base from the start, but we have a lot of choices, and I don't really know what to focus on.
Let me explain our problem:

- We're a small company (10 technical / dev employees + 10 other employees, marketing, sales,...) developing 4 SaaS software products
- All our devs work on the 4 products, and the 4 often evolve at the same time or almost, depending on the roadmap and priorities.
- We have a roadmap for each product, and a more general roadmap for strategy, innovation, etc...

We need to improve organization and communication within the technical team, so we'll be using a scrum organization, with sprints of around 3 weeks, and we need to have a "general" backlog grouping the 4 product backlogs, each grouping epics, stories, bugs, requests for evolutions...

 

My idea was therefore to feed this general backlog based on the product backlogs, and to launch sprints on this one alone, to centralize everything, while being able to manage software delivery versions, deployment and planning by customer (deployment of one or more software products per customer).

I was thinking of creating a general "Project Management" project on Jira (Jira Work Management), with a backlog that could group together 4 independent backlogs, but I don't know if that's feasible.

Or to create 4 Jira Software Scrum projects, but I don't know if it will be possible to centralize them later...

 

Right now, as CPO, it's complicated for me to keep track of 4 different backlogs, with sprints on each piece of software, it's really complicated.
Do you have any suggestions for integration with the Atlassion suite?
Or maybe even improvements on my process idea that will soon be implemented?

The flexibility of the teams makes the task very complex, hence my idea of grouping them into a general backlog, but I'm open to any suggestions regarding this idea...

 

Thank you very much ! 

Walter Buggenhout

Hi @Alexandre Prezio and welcome to the Community!

As a solution partner, we help companies to organise things in the best possible way from stories like this. The challenge goes a bit beyond a simple question and answer, as there's quite a bit involved.

From the scope of what your organisation does, I would definitely set up separate projects by product as a starting point, but most likely also set up a board (or boards) that group the work across those projects in a single place for your team. Since you also mention different roadmaps and project management, I would also consider adding Jira Product Discovery to your stack, as well as Confluence. But tools in my opinion always come last, after you look at what you do, how you work, how your teams and people collaborate and what makes you productive, successful and happy.

It might be a good idea to look for an Atlassian partner near you to help you make the right decisions.

Hope this helps!