How Use of Jira Dashboards Improved our Marketing Team's Efficiency

[#1]

Yesterday I had an interesting dinner conversation dedicated to Marketing in 2022. Many marketers I know have already switched careers or struggle to find the joy of working in marketing anymore (and think about changing their jobs).

I'm not an exception, though. I'm slightly bored after too many years dedicated to different marketing aspects. To keep the fire burning, I consistently try to:

1. Learn and experiment more.

2. Use my experience to support others.

3. Take care of teams' efficiency.

If you are deeply involved in the Atlassian Ecosystem, you already know marketing here is not messing around. It requires more than a basic skillset to fit your marketing approach. You must be intelligent, creative, simple, and efficient to stay noticed.

After my short Atlassian retirement, I came back as a member of a brand new marketing team full of ideas and looking forward to a bright new future. As exciting as it was, I also had this dark thought in my mind: “I’m so sick of marketing.”

Thankfully, we had much to work on polishing our brand, partners, apps, teamwork, and collaboration. When there is a struggle, my heart is happy. 💙

For a couple of months, we expanded our team, created a new workflow, and began the broad adoption of Jira and Confluence as our primary sources of collaboration and planning. And immediately stumbled on the question:

How is it going? Are we doing well enough?

You may have a team full of high-performing individuals, but each person's definition of “productivity" varies tremendously. So we needed precise data to prove we were on the right track.
As Atlassian users, we have the great advantage of using apps and integrations to automate and excel our processes even further. As app builders, sometimes we use them for free! 😃

Grumpy Pro Tip: if you are an Atlassian marketer and are not using your apps. It's No Good.

I've already explained our fancy new process, but let's dive deeply into how Jira Dashboards help us do our jobs better.

(If you are new to Jira Dashboards, here are 5 Atlassian tips for creating a killer agile dashboard in Jira Software)

Our General Marketing Dashboard

We track our marketing department's long-term and short-term progress on our primary Jira Dashboard. Long-term is our progress since day 1 of tracking, and short-term is our current Sprint.

We keep it simple and self-explanatory. You need to glance over the board to see if everything looks good. With New vs Done being our most important metric, we closely examine the graph's movement. As you can see, so far, so good 🙂

While the lines are synchronized in their moving up, I'm sleeping well.

Content Dashboard

Especially for our mighty content creator, the Content Dashboard is there to list only two metrics: ongoing work & simple progress chart.

Why it's valuable to us?

Never hear "So… what are you writing now?" again.

Events and Partners Dashboard

We recently onboarded a new team member responsible for our events, partner relationships, and internal activities (Welcome to the team, Jane! 🎉 )

While moving through her Jira & Confluence onboarding, she was slightly confused by the number of metrics we wanted to track on only one board. Jane immediately shared her need for a separate Scrum board and Jira Dashboard to track her activities more precisely.

Remember my number 3 fire-starter?

If Jane is searching for a way to become more efficient, we have a common goal!

 Her Dashboard consist of:

• partner to events tasks ratio;

• progress charts for each activity;

• New vs Done for the past month;

• latest updates and work in progress.

To me, it feels good to have a visual representation of our progress. It improves our mood, shows if any issues are present, and saves time from people "researching" what our activity state is.

It keeps the CEOs happy as well. 😉

[Andy Gladstone]

I’m sorry, but @Teodora V _Fun Inc_ you could write about paint drying on a wall and I would soak up every word. That being said, I’m happy that this article was about a more exciting topic and it got me thinking about how I can harness this same power in my teams. Thanks!

[Teodora V _Fun Inc_]

And three years ago, I was convinced I'd never write a proper line, @Andy Gladstone. Thank you for always being a spark to this flame by providing feedback and encouragement. 

I'm glad you find it useful!