At its Unleash event in Berlin, Atlassian today announced a series of updates to its Jira suite of software and work management products designed to help teams discover and collaborate on efforts faster.
Atlassian develops tools and services that help organizations manage application development as well as IT management and collaboration tools. Among the announcements today was the rollout of its Jira Product Discovery service, which helps product managers develop and prioritize new ideas for development.
In addition, Atlassian is now also making its Jira Work Management service part of every Jira Software license. Jira Work Management is a service that helps align business teams with software teams to keep track of an overall product development effort. Atlassian also announced a service that includes new workflow templates for different use cases to help organizations quickly get started on new projects.
"We're now at this point where there's a Jira service for every single team," Megan Cook, Atlassian’s head of product for agile solutions, told ITPro Today. "So you've got your developers still at the core of software development, and all of these teams are able to align really well behind them to deliver software."
Atlassian Reveals Jira Product Discovery at Unleash Event
At the earliest stage of development — often referred to as the "discovery" phase — product teams need to figure out what the business needs are and how an application will support those requirements.
The intention of the new Jira Product Discovery service is to help organizations with the discovery phase. Jira Product Discovery does this by helping product managers and their teams prioritize and collaborate on new product ideas, according to Cook.
Atlassian created Jira Product Discovery to help product teams figure out and prioritize what to build.
Ideas within the discovery phase can be mapped against different goals that the organization has for a given application. The ideas can be scored in different ways, including business alignment, impact, and effort required, to help the team prioritize what efforts should come first. The prioritization process is intended to be transparent, so different teams within the organization, including sales, design, executive management, and developers, can work together.
Cook emphasized that the new Jira Product Discovery service will integrate with the rest of the Jira software suite, which provides issue tracking and development progress tools as part of the software development lifecycle.
Jira Work Management Aims to Unleash Business and Development Teams
Application development doesn't just impact developers; it also impacts business teams including marketing, design, sales, finance, and human resources.
While software developers are working on code, there can be corresponding teams that must figure out how to market and sell an application. Jira Work Management is essentially a project management tool for the business teams, Cook said.
For example, if a team wants to build a new feature and there's some text in there that requires feedback from legal or sales, they need to be able to collaborate with those teams.
"A lot of these teams have their own processes and things … that's outside of the software team, but the software team depends on them for different bits and pieces," Cook said. "We wanted to build something that could tightly integrate and help all of these different teams collaborate together."
In a bid to help out its users and to boost adoption, Atlassian is offering Jira Work Management as a free feature for all JIRA Software customers until 2024.
Rounding out Atlassian's updates are new Jira templates that help organizations get started with different types of workflows. One of the new templates is from usertesting.com to help teams integrate a testing strategy into product development.
"We're partnering with several customers to showcase their industry-leading best practices and how they've configured their workflows in Jira Software," Cook said. "We've taken from their playbooks the things that are making them really successful, [and] putting them into templates so that customers can just get in there and find the things that resonate with them."
About the author
Sean Michael Kerner is an IT consultant, technology enthusiast and tinkerer. He consults to industry and media organizations on technology issues.
