An update on Jira Align customer feedback – June 2023

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Introduction

Hi, everyone!

We’re back with another quarterly highlight reel of recent improvements to Jira Align. As always, we relied heavily on your feedback to prioritize these improvements, and we’re grateful for engaged customers like you for all the conversations, research sessions, and brainstorming you’ve generously shared with us.

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Integrations and API improvements

Jira Integration

Connecting your work to strategy requires a strong link between Jira and Jira Align, so we’re continually investing in the Jira integration (Azure DevOps folks, we have updates for you too--read on!).

New Jira connector APIs: in conversations with you, we’ve heard it’s extremely time-consuming to create and manage Jira Projects and Teams in Jira Align. To that end, we’ve enabled you to create, read, update, and delete field mappings for five key Connector settings via the API.

Updating the connector to reflect Jira’s changes to epic fields: in light of recent changes to epic fields in Jira, we updated the Jira connector to rename a few fields (Feature name custom field → Jira epic name custom field, Summary → Jira Epic Name) and update how a few of the fields sync to one another.

Better troubleshooting for board mapping: we added additional messaging and warnings to let you know when a board’s associated project(s) are removed.

Azure DevOps (ADO) Integration

Syncing custom fields: we know you have critical information in ADO that lives outside the fields currently mapped to Jira Align, so we now support bidirectional syncs of custom text input and dropdown fields for features and stories. More coming soon!

 

Streamlined connector setup: we removed no-longer-used settings from the setup screen and changed two default settings (for newly created connections only) to reflect how most customers use the connector.

API improvements

We kicked off an effort this quarter to ensure consistent, complete API coverage across the product. This means making sure all objects have consistent method support, consistent coverage, and that all object properties are available.

This quarter, we shipped several API improvements:

• GET, POST, PUT, and PATCH support for capability acceptance criteria

• POST, PUT, and PATCH support for capability links

• GET, POST, and PUT support for epic acceptance criteria

• POST, PUT, and PATCH support for epic links

• PATCH support for releases

• PUT and PATCH support for value streams

• GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE support for Jira connector product mappings

• Copy endpoints for capabilities and features

• Audit log endpoints for value streams, products, customers, and cities

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Tracking and planning work

Objectives

You can expect ambitious improvements to objectives in Jira Align in the coming quarters--we’re just getting started. On the heels of extensive customer research, a few themes emerged:

• Stronger links between Objectives and the work connected to them (surface objectives in backlog, dependencies, etc.)

• Usability challenges: too many clicks to get to important info, limited ability to drill down

• No lifecycle for an objective: can’t draft/iterate a future objective, or archive it once it’s complete

• Need more flexibility in how objectives and key results are structured

Table improvements in the OKR hub: our first investment in objectives is a facelift to the OKR hub. The OKR Hub’s tables are now configurable, filterable, and more user-friendly overall; for example, you can customize column sizes, reorder columns or search for specific objectives.

Forecast

When it comes time to do capacity planning, we know everyone does this a little differently, and that many of you need more granularity and flexibility than what Jira Align used to provide. We’re excited to share the first of several updates to our forecast functionality.

Forecast by feature: forecasting by feature is one of our top customer requests, and we’re proud to announce it’s here! You can now forecast at increased granularity in Jira Align, which means no more error-prone spreadsheets. We also made some improvements to the overall forecast experience.

 

Ideation

Accommodating bigger ideas: the ideation description fields have been expanded to accommodate up to 10,000 characters throughout the UI and API. Additionally, we have added a feature that allows for expanding idea cards on the grid page.

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New navigation

Technically this doesn’t belong in this post--the first phase of rollout is a couple weeks away--but we’ve been testing the new Jira Align navigation experience with a handful of customers and are so excited to share it with you.

New, easier-to-use navigation: the new experience is more than just a change from vertical → horizontal navigation; it’s designed to center you around what’s most intuitive to you: your team. We’ve been testing the new experience with a handful of customers to positive feedback. On July 7, admins will see a toggle to enable/disable the new experience, so you can begin to try it out for yourself! On the 7th, we’ll share detailed instructions on how to enable/disable the new navigation experience and the planned rollout schedule.

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Other product improvements

Modernizing our UI architecture: Many of you have shared you’d like Jira Align to invest in usability/ease of use. As an important step in this area, our team continues its effort to modernize our UI technology to align more closely with other Atlassian products. The new navigation and OKR experiences are the first examples of it. This new architecture enables us to further invest in automation, including unlocking new possibilities for automation in the modernized UI.

Removals: by removing virtually unused features in Jira Align, we can focus on what’s most important to you. This quarter, we removed several unused features (e.g. Trello and Rational connectors, several legacy reports). You shouldn’t notice these removals (they are, after all, unused!) but as a reminder, we always share removals in release notes well in advance of their planned removal dates.

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That’s it for this quarter! Want a sneak peek of next quarter’s update? Watch our Q3 roadmap webinar here! Otherwise, as always, our cloud roadmap and release notes are great ways to stay up to date on the latest developments. A huge thank you to all of our customers for a being our co-drivers in building the future of Jira Align.

Thanks,

Allyse

[Natalia Baryshnikova]

+1 to @Allyse Brown thank you note - we are endlessly grateful to our Enterprise Agility and Jira Align customers who contribute their thoughts on how we can improve. Cheers to all of you, keep it up!