Boosting your Marketing team productivity with Jira & Confluence. Step 2: Interest

[#1]

It’s been almost two years between ‘coming soon’ and Step 2 — two years of disruptions, progress, regress, and knowledge building. Recently someone asked me when this Step 2 is coming, and I was a bit ashamed of providing a tasteless answer relevant to ‘I have no idea.’

Let’s fix it.

For everyone confused about why Step 1 is Adoption:
Usually, the adoption phase is associated with the end of a user journey. It represents the closing of the product onboarding circle where your users have already mastered the game. My perspective is a bit different. With productivity in Jira and Confluence, some of your users are already power users of one or maybe both products. Others are new joiners with zero or basic knowledge of what these products do and what we aim to achieve. In this case, Adoption is enrolling everyone in Jira and Confluence as their primary collaboration source.

Welcome to Step 2.

For most users, onboarding to a new tool is not the experience of their lives. Jira and Confluence are relatively easy and comfortable to use, but setting both places for work requires a particular effort.

To prepare your team for success, you need to provoke their interest. Make a team-focused presentation about how these apps can solve your team’s challenges and highlight the features that resonate with your team the most. Building interest around your idea depends on how well you can promote the value of Jira and Confluence for marketing, so pick your words and examples wisely.

When Old Street’s marketing team considered onboarding to Jira & Confluence for our day-to-day work, I made a company-wide virtual event for sharing my experience and the primary marketing use cases with those products. Thanks to the free low-user tier, I actively used my personal Jira and Confluence instances to demonstrate use cases and show real examples of how our work can be improved.

Jira Software or Jira Work Management?

The obvious choice would be JWM. Made for Marketing, HR, Operations, Legal, and all other business teams, Jira Work Management is a great tool to plan, log and track work.

You have the benefits of intuitive UI, visibility across metrics like due dates, assignee, and priority, list and status of tasks, and calendar view. What I love in JWM is the ability to see everything on one page and easily spot any disruptions in your process.

However, I usually go to Jira Software as my preferred solution. Why? Because we really need these Sprints 🙂

To be a successful and efficient Marketing team, you not only need good content and an intelligent approach. You need timing.

Marketing efforts take a while, and if you let them slip through the calendar cracks, your project may take forever and already be redundant by the time you finish and ship it.

Jira Light and Confluence Heavy

Going with two relatively big products requires a good balance. For a business team, go easy with your Jira setup and hit heavy on your Confluence space.

Help your users stay organized by giving them the instructions and to-dos in Jira but navigating them to Confluence for idea realization and execution.

Yes, it’s been a while since Step 1 of the series, but I see how much progress and understanding my team and me have gained.

It’s a slow and sometimes challenging process, so warn your team about that. Show them the benefits but never spare details on how much time and effort this transition would take.

Don’t flame their interest with promises of fast returns and immediate results. Give them the time to enroll, experiment and fail in the process. Give yourself time to cope with all the mess 🙂

This will lead your team into the Trial zone, Step 3 (coming sooner than Step 2) of Boosting your Marketing team productivity with Jira & Confluence article series.