5 Tips for Keeping Teams and Stakeholders Aligned on Product Requirements

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When you’re managing complex projects, it can be a challenge to keep teams and stakeholders aligned on what’s most important. For example, if tech teams are working in Jira and Confluence, but business stakeholders don’t have access to these platforms, visibility on progress will be limited. And if requirements aren’t clearly laid out, everyone might have a different idea about priorities, which leads to costly blockers and work left undone.

How do you avoid these problems? Here are five tips to help you.

Disclaimer: We’re from Requirement Yogi. For some of these tips, we’ll be using our app as an example.

1. Make business goals for requirements transparent

It’s key that the teams working on the product understand the business goals behind it. If they’re unsure of the reasons for certain requirements, they won’t know where each requirement falls in terms of priority and may not see how other teams would be affected.  

From the start, all team members should have visibility into the high-level goals. Those working on fulfilling functional or technical requirements still need to be aware of the business requirements.

To ensure understanding, document requirements in a place where everyone can easily access them, for example, in Confluence and Jira, if that’s where your teams are working.

2. Arrange requirements according to priority

Not only is it important to be aware of the overarching requirements, but it’s also crucial to recognize priorities. If you fail to prioritize, some requirements might be completed first, but building blocks for requirements that take longer may be overlooked, leading to delays and inefficiency.

To prioritize requirements and show the big picture in Jira and Confluence, create a Confluence page for each component with all the technical specifications included. Set up Jira stories for work related to the components and set the priority in the issue Priority field. Include links to these stories on the relevant component pages in Confluence. 

Whenever you make an update in Confluence, update the related Jira story as well to ensure both sides contain the latest information. As you can imagine, going back and forth between Jira and Confluence to identify and update changes is a tedious process, but there is an easier way.

Caption: Here’s an example of a built-in Confluence requirements template showing a linked Jira issue. 

To systematically update your requirements on both sides, consider leveraging a dedicated requirement management app like Requirement Yogi, which allows you to create a link from a Jira issue to the exact line of the Confluence page with the requirement details and displays your requirements in a traceability matrix. When you arrange the Jira issues according to priority in your backlog, they’ll also appear in that order in the matrix.

 

Caption: The traceability matrix shows the priority of requirements and how they’re linked, along with the status of related Jira issues. 

3. Predict and prevent possible blockers

Teams should have access to the full requirements documentation, not just to the requirements they’re working on. That way, they can see whether their component blocks another team’s. 

You can use an app to provide greater visibility so team members can easily check which issues are related to requirements and their status.

Caption: The dependencies table shows relationships between requirements; selecting a requirement will show further details.

4. Clearly differentiate versions

For software teams working with multiple versions of a product, requirements often change over time, and you’ll want to keep track of these changes and compare them against the original requirements. If someone edits the requirements or changes a Jira issue description without saving a baseline version, vital information may be lost.

An app makes taking baseline snapshots and comparing them easier. Subsequent changes to requirements or issues won’t affect this baseline, and complex requirements can be put on a dedicated page for reference.

Caption: In Requirement Yogi, you can freeze a baseline to refer back to.

5. Ensure regular reports are available to all stakeholders

For teams working in Jira and Confluence, it’s easy to view reports on requirement status. With native features, users can all access the requirements documents and see how Jira issues are linked to them.

Drawing back to the example of an advanced feature like Requirement Yogi’s traceability matrix, you can generate reports from the matrix so everyone is aligned on the status. But what about business stakeholders who don’t have access to your instances? Requirement Yogi also allows you to export reports to Excel or pdf to share all the key details with business stakeholders. 

 

Caption: Export a traceability matrix to Excel or pdf to share with business stakeholders.

Get Greater Visibility into Your Product Requirements

Following these tips will help teams stay better aligned on requirements whether you’re working with native Jira and Confluence features or with an app. If you’re considering an app to make requirements management easier, check out our Marketplace listing.