CLOSED Ask Me Anything (AMA): How UserTesting ships work faster with Kelsey Turbeville, Senior PM

[Finch Grace]

Join Kelsey Turbeville, Senior Product Manager for an AMA, and learn how UserTesting built a unified workflow with Atlassian products — and ships products 3X faster.

Hi Jira Community!

Whether you have Project Management in your job title or something totally different, working as a global team and developing new workflows takes coordination, planning, and follow through.

We recently shared how UserTesting delivers better products 3x faster with workflows powered by Jira Software, Jira Product Discovery, and Confluence.

UserTesting’s Kelsey Turbeville, Senior Product Manager, Machine Learning will be LIVE on Thursday, April 6th from 1-2 pm PDT to answer all of your questions about how her team created a workflow that would let them develop with confidence and complete visibility, and to share her best practices and tips.

Start submitting questions below, upvote others' submissions, and stay tuned as Kelsey will be answering anything and everything about collaborative work on April 6th!

[Chris Hall · Accepted solution]

Hey Kelsey! Question for you: What do you feel JPD has brought to your workflow that you aren’t/weren’t able to achieve with just Jira Software? Since you set up your workflow from scratch, does that mean you introduced all your Atlassian solutions at the same time? Was there a specific order that you’d recommend?

[Kelsey Turbeville]

Hey Chris! 

The big benefit for me of JPD is managing ideas (and the insights related to them!). My team gets a lot of great feature requests and suggestions, and JPD (not Jira) is the place that I file them all. Pre-JPD, I’d use a Google doc or Confluence page to list them out, then add insights as bullet points. Now I can link to them out of JPD, which is a lot efficient, plus it gives everyone visibility into what’s motivating our prioritization decisions. 

When my team built out its processes, UserTesting was already using Atlassian solutions, but we weren’t using them consistently, especially for the discovery phase. I was using Confluence a lot, and my engineering counterparts were using it for sprint planning and work tracking. So for us, the first move was to set up a Jira workflow and troubleshoot that. Jira let us get our day-to-day work tracked, and then I could focus more on the big picture.

If I were doing it again, I might actually start with JPD, since in my experience, that’s what gives the best ‘top-down’ visibility and captures the ‘why’ of our initiatives. Plus it was really helpful for the engineering team to see the roadmap views. Now that we have it, we just bring what's in JPD directly into Jira. 

Thanks for the questions!

[Abby Stiris · Accepted solution]

Hi Kelsey! Which automations have you found to be the most useful for your work? What was the best way to get started?

[Kelsey Turbeville]

The automation I find really helpful was one that one of our engineering colleagues created. It creates a Jira ticket when you create and publish a project plan. Using Jira in the discovery phase was not something we were used to doing, so by automating the ticket creation, it really helped make the workflow easy—it was one less thing to think about. 

The one I’m most interested in adding next is the ‘smart auto-assign’ automation, especially based on skillset. Since we have so many cross functional projects, I think it will really help us be more efficient!

[Christa Parrish · Accepted solution]

Hey Kelsey 👋🏽

Here's my question: Always having stepped into roles where workflows were defined, what was the most surprising challenge when setting up a workflow from scratch? Thanks!

[Kelsey Turbeville]

Hi Christa!

What a great question! 

Honestly, the most surprising part was how many seemingly-small choices there are along the way, like “How many swimlanes do we need?” or “Should an initiative map to a market-release feature, or would a single feature have multiple initiatives?” For a lot of these questions, there aren’t really right or wrong answers, and I found that the most important thing was to check how others are doing it, get my team’s buy-in, then try something, while making my team feel empowered to make changes or suggestions. Getting my team into a spirit of ‘we’re experimenting with this together’ helped a lot. 

The other big lesson was how much setting up working processes like this helps in the long run. It feels like a lot of effort to start from a blank slate, and it is, and there’s a lot of uncertainty—but within the first couple weeks of getting my ‘ideas bank’ organized in JPD I was sharing it out, just because it made alignment and cross-team discussion so much easier.

[Christa Parrish]

Thanks so much! These are great tips.

[Carlos Garcia Navarro · Accepted solution]

And another question: Is there any current challenge, or a feature request that you wish would be implemented to enable more improvements or efficiencies to your use case? Thanks!

[Kelsey Turbeville]

What a fun question! For me, the easier you can make it to manage and display insights, the better! Pasting lots of insights into JPD and Confluence can be a hassle, and it’s easy to miss one or two. Plus, stakeholders then need to follow the links to learn more. So anything where I could more easily batch-import feedback (like tickets) from customers, show customer quotes or videos directly in JPD or Confluence, or more easily display data (for instance, dashboards from somewhere like Tableau), the better. 

[Carlos Garcia Navarro · Accepted solution]

Hi Kelsey! Can you please share what your process was before adopting this new workflow using the Atlassian toolset? I'm curious if you had to replace the process to make it work with Atlassian tools, or if you kept the same process but adopting Atlassian is what caused the improvements. Thanks!

[Kelsey Turbeville]

Hi Carlos!

We were already using the Atlassian toolset to some extent, but not all that consistently. We relied a lot on Confluence in particular, but also Google docs and then coordinating work planning on Slack, especially in the discovery phase of the product process, which meant it was sometimes hard to track back to what decisions were made, when, and why. Plus, all of our projects are cross-team, so managing alignment is huge. It took some effort to switch over to being Atlassian-first, but we modeled our templates and Jira board on the workflow we were already using, so that made it easier.  The new process was a more standardized, better coordinated version of what we were (mostly) doing before. 

It took a couple cycles to really get used to it, but after that, having our work documented and tracked in a consistent way was so helpful that we were very motivated to stick with it!

[Kelsey Turbeville]

Thanks so much for the fantastic questions, all! It's been great chatting with the Atlassian Community. Feel free to reach out or connect on LinkedIn—always happy to continue the conversation!

[Finch Grace]

@Kelsey Turbeville Thank YOU so very much for your time and the thoughtful and insightful responses! It has been great having you!