Keeping your sanity as an Atlassian Product Owner

[Kamil Beer]

Hi,

I will be speaking at a Czech Jira conference in February about the topic of Jira+Confluence Maintenance. One of the subtopics I would like to tackle is "Keeping your sanity as the Atlassian Product Owner". In it, I would like to cover the best practices about maintaining Atlassian tools in a corporate environment, standardization, documentation and how to deal with terrible requests.

I would like to ask you about your experiences with being an Atlassian product owner - what are the do's and don'ts. Could you please share your stories with me here for inspiration?

Thank you!

[Mirek]

One of the biggest problems in maintaining Jira/Confluence are .. addons. There are too many of them with different support and safety.  If those are no specific rules which addons can be installed and when it would be a complete mess. Handling maintenance of an instance where people keep asking for new things is very hard. Especially if things are free and not having much arguments to deny such a requests. Product Owners should be ready to deal with addon requests in a good way. If you are too open you can end up with 40 addons where in one or two years half of then would not be used or forgotten but if you want to remove you notice that some projects or spaces are are still using them and removing something now could be a problem...

Second thing that might be a pain .. customization. Of course something is possible via script or other hack but think about maintenance, upgrades later.. Depends of course how big the customization is but overall avoid changing much if this is not really affecting everyone..

Other good decision of the Product Owner is to stick with Enterprise Releases even if that mean no super new cool features for a half of the year after release (in latest version). That is very useful when you need to do a quick upgrade when there is a bug or security issue.. No need to do all the user tests, addons and customization should be still working.. It would save a lot of time.

Everything of course depends on the size of the instance but overall above rules are good for everyone unless someone do not really care what would happen in the future.

[Kamil Beer]

Very true. Thanks for your insightful reply!