#JiraCustomerTemplates: Discover how UserTesting ships work 3x faster
At Atlassian we take great pride in the success our customers achieve when they use our products. #JiraCustomerTemplates is a monthly spotlight series where we share customer solutions using Jira, including easy-to-install templates based on their workflows.
Who is UserTesting?
UserTesting.com enables organizations to understand what it’s like to be their customer, with a video-first experience testing platform that has a global, opt-in network of contributors. With UserTesting, any team can watch real people engage with products, apps, or services and can easily get a vivid, first-person understanding of any experience.
Kelsey Turbeville, Senior Product Manager, Machine Learning, at UserTesting walks us through how her team sped up the development process using Jira Software, Jira Product Discovery, and Confluence while incorporating customer feedback at every stage and staying agile as a globally distributed team.
What was the challenge being solved?
Kelsey’s team was working on a product which uses machine learning from model development to how it gets serviced in product for UserTesting’s customers. It’s a pretty new space, and Kelsey’s team had the opportunity — and challenge — of setting up their workflow from scratch.
If that wasn’t daunting enough, they had to be creative since the team is global. Kelsey is in San Francisco, with engineering counterparts in Scotland, design partners in Canada, and tech leads in the American midwest.
Ultimately, UserTesting had to be able to create a workflow that would let them develop with confidence and complete visibility:
What solution did UserTesting create?
Before the dev handoff, when UserTesting was validating product ideas, developing the model, and going through the design phase, they needed a centralized way to stay on the same page.
This starts with Jira Product Discovery (JPD). “Machine learning is an exciting space, and at any given time they have a lot of product opportunities,” says Kelsey. “We get ideas from our customers and field teams, and to manage them all I add them to Jira Product Discovery as they come in. We’ve also found that capturing insights here really helps us stay organized and prioritized.”
When Kelsey or a teammate finds something relating to an opportunity, like analytics data or customer feedback, they can add it immediately to Jira Product Discovery instead of sending it through email or slack — and risk it falling through the cracks. This saves time when planning & prioritizing — plus leadership has visibility (always a bonus!).
Jira Product Discovery also helps identify further validation that may need to be done. But how do they gather any additional research information, mitigate risk, and vet user needs?
UX research is a shared resource, and product teams gather a lot of feedback themselves. This is where Confluence comes in. Kelsey can go to the team’s Confluence page, where they have templates for all phases of the product development process. For research planning, once they fill out all necessary information and hit publish, automations they’ve set up automatically create a card on their Jira Software board.
As soon as the card is created, team members can be tagged in to start planning out the work. Jira is key, with so many different teams, roles, and time zones all contributing. “Without it we could really lose track of who is doing what and end up either repeating work or dropping the ball,” Kelsey says, pointing out that leads to delayed delivery times and expenses for the company.
As UserTesting reviews customer interviews, they make clips in their own software of the most important parts, marking them with the project name and the Jira ticket so it’s easier to share their customers' POV with stakeholders. As they finish the interviews they attach the clips directly to the Jira card.
Once everything is centralized in Jira, the team is ready to be flexible and change course if they need to since that’s where all cross-functional partners intersect.
When they’re done with customer interviews, they go back to Confluence and use a results template to publish their findings — they now know exactly what decisions they’re making, why, and can reference back to them in the future.
From here, Kelsey’s team knows if they need to do more discovery around product viability or if they’re ready to kickoff the design and modeling process.
When they move on to that next phase, this workflow lets them stay organized enough to actually run both processes side-by-side, and kick off engineering work before design or modeling development is complete.
“By adopting this working style, what used to take us to several quarters now gets done in about a quarter with streamlined collaboration and smooth handoffs, and we’re able to deliver innovative products while still staying agile.” – Kelsey Turbeville, Senior Product Manager, Machine Learning
What was the outcome?
UserTesting now delivers better products 3x faster with Jira Software, Jira Product Discovery, and Confluence.
There’s now an established culture across the ENTIRE org leveraging this workflow as a best practice; allowing for faster development with confidence!
- Teams are more agile – pace of delivery from idea to release is 3x
- Teams make informed decisions – knowing the information they have is always up to date
- Teams are aligned from planning to release — the work is visible, and collaboration is easier
Interested in trying it for yourself? You can use the same process as UserTesting with their template bundle (or modify it for your own needs). This bundle includes:
- Jira Software, Jira Product Discovery, Confluence
- 2 pre-configured, customizable Jira Software project templates
- 2 third-party integrations: Slack & UserTesting
Want to learn even more? Join UserTesting for a Community AMA!
On April 6th at 1:00 -2:00 pm PST, Kelsey Turbeville, Senior Product Manager at UserTesting, will join us for a Community AMA. You’ll be able to ask questions live, upvote others' submissions, and chat with Kelsey as she answers anything and everything about UserTesting’s solution and setting up collaborative workflows. Submit your questions here!
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