An update on Jira Align customer feedback – February 2023
Hi everyone,
Ensuring our customers have a great experience with our products is our top priority. Your feedback plays an important role to ensure we’re investing in the areas that will provide the most value to the most customers. I’m excited to share another update on improvements we’ve made to Jira Align based on your feedback.
Integration with Jira
“The most frustrating thing is the syncing with Jira. Why haven't you fixed this yet?”
A seamless user experience between Jira and Jira Align is one of the key themes we hear from our customers and remains one of our highest priorities. Since my update in October, we’ve made several improvements to our Jira integration.
Bi-directional syncing of estimates: T-shirt estimates and point estimates now support bi-directional sync to ensure teams don’t need to enter data in both products. Teams are also now able to use a different Jira custom field for story points and feature (Jira epic) estimates, which improves the reliability of the Jira team reports.
Sprint mapping (Beta): We’ve updated our sprint sync logic to map Jira and Jira Align sprints based on end dates set in Jira. Teams will no longer need to keep sprints in a specific order or avoid using bucket sprints for sprints to map correctly.
Board mapping (Beta): Jira Align admins are able to easily identify teams with sprint mapping issues using new filters and identifiers on the Jira connector board mapping page. Admins no longer need to review every integrated team or wait for users to report data synchronization issues.
Sprint mapping and board mapping are currently in Beta. Please reach out to your Technical Account Manager if you’d like to have these features turned on for your instance.
Status mapping for shared Jira workflows: In our last update, we shared plans to automate status mapping when using shared Jira workflows. However, we realized there are a few underlying issues we need to address first. This quarter, we’re focused on closing as many status mapping tickets as we can before starting work to support shared workflows.
UI improvements: We’ve also shipped a series of improvements to simplify the setup and management of the connector:
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On the Jira connector settings page, we updated the setting and custom field mapping names and tooltips to help administrators better understand the behavior of each setting or field
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We added minimum and maximum values to the sync timers to ensure optimal sync cycle times
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The Jira project field was added to your Details Panel Settings, so it can mark required or not required for all integrated work items
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Search and pagination were added to the custom field mapping modal to help avoid performance issues and make it easier to find and manage existing mappings
API improvements: We’re actively working on APIs that enable you to automate the management of your Jira Connector. Over the next several releases, we’ll be shipping endpoints to:
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Manage Jira Align program to Jira project mappings
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Manage Jira Align team to Jira board mappings
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Manage custom field team mappings
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Manage custom field product mappings
Usability and efficiency
"It's not always intuitive. After using it for a while I am now used to it, but I find Jira to be much more intuitive.”
While it’s great that Jira Align is such a feature-rich product, we also know that it can be difficult to navigate at times. We’re making several improvements to make Jira Align easier to use and more efficient.
Navigation experience: We are working on a new navigation experience to help new and existing users find what they need faster. As we shared in the last update, the new horizontal navigation menu and new room sidebar menu will have an Atlassian look and feel, and speed onboarding for users already familiar with other products like Jira Software or Confluence. We’ll also introduce onboarding guides to help users learn how to navigate Jira Align.
Finally, we’ll be introducing a new homepage that will allow users to navigate their recent rooms, starred pages, and recently updated items with one click.
Responding to feedback: We’ve been growing our research and development team, which has allowed us to make a significant investment in improving the overall quality of our product. Our teams have spent time over several weeks reviewing every single Jira Align JAC ticket. We are in the process of updating the priority and status of each ticket this quarter and will continue to do so on an ongoing basis.
Our review highlighted areas of the product that are drawing a high number of tickets. We will invest time in fixing bugs and improving quality, but in the process, we may close or delay resolving some tickets because we’ve decided it would be better to evaluate and improve an entire feature by adding it to our roadmap.
Tracking, reporting and representing work
”For now, it serves as an portfolio administration tool, to have a single source of the truth. For Jira Align to become an Portfolio Management tool the report & analysis function needs to be much much more flexible and open.”
We know how important the ability to track, report, and represent work is to your business and are addressing this on several fronts, including improvements to Objectives, Forecasts, Custom Hierarchies, and Enterprise Insights.
Objectives (OKRs): Our team recently completed a design audit of the legacy and new OKR experience along with a series of reverse demos with customers. Based on this research, we’ve identified three focus areas for Objectives in Jira Align:
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Users feel creating and editing Objectives is slow and cumbersome
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Users find it hard to get a high-level overview of Objective health
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Users find it hard to share the “why” behind their Objectives' statuses
This quarter, we'll focus on improving the new OKR hub by simplifying filters, introducing custom column widths in the grid, guiding users with more tooltips, adding keyboard shortcuts and scalability, fixing pagination, and addressing other relevant bugs for the new OKR hub. We recognize that there are fundamental problems with Objectives to solve, but we know we can make improvements to this slice of work quickly while we continue to iterate and test larger improvements with customers through design prototypes.
Forecasts: Similar to our approach for Objectives, our team is performing design audits, discussing feedback and pain points with customers, and prioritizing enhancements to Forecasts that address past issues and drive new value.
We’re planning to add the ability to offer team estimates at the feature-level for customers who seek granularity beyond the epic and capability level. Additionally, we plan to make performance enhancements and improve the user experience by clarifying where information should be input and reviewed.
Custom Hierarchies: We are beginning a similar process for Custom Hierarchies and plan to share more specific goals and objectives in the coming months.
Enterprise Insights: We know how important it is to find the data you are looking for in Enterprise Insights in order to create the reports you need. Since my last update, the enhancements to Enterprise Insights include:
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New forecast data for forecast buffer, program increment override weeks and in-scope flag
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Addition of cost centers
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Support for custom room status
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Key results override scores and notes
This quarter, our team is focusing on enhancements to the Enterprise Insights data schema including; epic data, expanding ideation data, and more complete cost center data.
Technical performance
“Speed and response time is a critical pitfall. With reasonable response time I could probably have a few hours worth of my work week time back.”
Product performance is a critical part of ensuring we provide you with a great customer experience. We’ve made a few enhancements behind the scenes to make Jira Align faster and more robust.
Modernizing our UI architecture: Our team has begun the effort to modernize our UI technology to align more closely with our other products. The new navigation and OKR experiences are the first examples of it. This new architecture enables us to further invest in automation that is not possible today.
Work Tree: We’ve addressed performance problems on the Work Tree pages and have observed 80-90%+ improvements for large datasets.
Set up, configuration and administration
“Jira Align has a lot of things that are locked down due to permissions. It may be helpful if I could have the access of two roles (or more) if that is the way our team functions.”
We know that your time is valuable, which is why we’ve made progress on several fronts to reduce administration overhead and make it easier to set up and manage Jira Align.
Feature flags: Jira Align had a long list of features behind feature flags, which required the assistance of our support team to turn on. To make sure customers are getting the most out of Jira Align and reduce the overhead in setting up a new Jira Align site, we permanently enabled many of those features. You can check them out in the 10.112 release notes and 10.113 release notes.
REST APIs: We’re seeing great adoption of our REST APIs and continue to invest in endpoints that not only expand integration capabilities, but also simplify the setup and management of Jira Align. Since our last update, we’ve shipped the following:
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Added support for custom fields on all Risk endpoints and a new /{id}/editmeta endpoint
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Added support for the DELETE method for cities, customers, goals, ideas, products, programs, regions, releases, release vehicles, risks, snapshots, sprints, themes, and value streams
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Added a 403 “forbidden” error to differentiate when a user does not have proper system permissions (e.g. the user does not have permission to edit features) and when a user is not authorized to use the API.
We also kicked off an effort to ensure consistency in our API coverage. This means making sure that all objects have a consistent method (eg. GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE), consistent coverage (eg. support for audit logs, acceptance criteria, links, etc.) and that all object properties (eg. epic field financial fields, release sync sprints, etc.) are available. Since the last update, we’ve made several updates to our APIs. You can view them in the 10.112 release notes and 10.113 release notes.
This quarter, in addition to the Jira connector management APIs mentioned above, we’ll continue adding support for the DELETE method and addressing inconsistencies in our API coverage.
So, thank you again. Your valuable feedback has helped us significantly in defining the future of Jira Align. We’ll continue sharing updates like this each quarter to give you better visibility into the overarching themes we’re hearing from customers and the improvements we’re working on. To stay in the loop, keep an eye on our cloud roadmap and release notes or ‘watch’ this article to be notified when I share the next update.
– Natalia
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Natalia Baryshnikova
About this author
Head of Product, Enterprise Agility
Atlassian
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