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A sprint backlog is like an agile team's treasure map — checking off each item is like visiting a different place on the map. By the end of a sprint or iteration, the team will have delivered previously agreed outcomes and ultimately achieved their sprint goal. This is like getting to the ✖️ on a treasure map.

Join us as we find the answers you need to successfully complete each sprint. You'll learn about a sprint backlog’s purpose, plus who creates, owns, updates, and uses it.

What's a sprint backlog?

A sprint backlog consists of the items that need to be completed in order to get to the sprint goal. It should go into artifact during the sprint planning meeting. A sprint backlog has three parts:

• The sprint. Each sprint backlog targets a specific iteration.
• The sprint goal. This is the higher level aim for each sprint. To achieve it, the development team completes certain items from the product backlog.
• A plan. The sprint backlog represents a plan to deliver a product increment by the end of the sprint. It's organized to allow for progress tracking with to-do, in-progress, and done items, plus effort estimations and remaining workload.

The sprint backlog should always be accessible and up-to-date so that the development team understands the work and can see what is coming up next. It should also have enough detail to allow tracking work progress.

Each sprint starts with a sprint backlog, and the artifact's lifespan equals the sprint's duration. You may expect to find work items — user stories, tasks, or bugs — in it.

The sprint backlog is the development team's go-to home to find all the ideas for what to work on. At every Daily Stand-Up,, the team looks at it to let others know what they did the day before. Additionally, they recall or adjust priorities based on what they need to do for the next day(s).

🧐 During the Daily Stand-Up, developers also use the sprint backlog to evaluate the sprint's progress.

The sprint backlog is not only a way of keeping the development team's eyes on the prize. 👀 It's also a way to discuss how well they achieved the sprint goal.

At any point in a sprint, to-do, in-progress, and done items are included in the sprint backlog for anyone to review and use to calculate the remaining workload. This helps verify if the development team is on track to achieve the sprint goal. ✌️

Jira provides a burndown chart to check the development team's work. This displays the remaining workload for the current sprint. In addition, the chart shows:

• Work in progress
• The distribution of work throughout the iteration

A Jira burndown chart also helps evaluate whether additional items fit into the sprint and effort estimations were accurate.

🛑 Keep in mind that you don't need a sprint backlog if you follow the Kanban framework. That’s because Kanban isn’t about working in timeboxes (the sprints).

Now, the sprint backlog isn't an off-the-shelf artifact that you can use in your project — every project is unique. So, someone must be responsible for populating the sprint backlog with work items.

Besides defining what a sprint backlog is, we should discuss what sets them apart from product backlogs.

Sprint backlogs vs. product backlogs

Though their names are similar, a sprint backlog and product backlog serve different purposes. A product backlog is:

• A collection of work items to either bring a new product to the market or improve an existing product
• A list of work items to tackle in the future
• A set of work items arranged by priority, with the most priority at the top
• The source of the sprint backlog items

On the other hand, a sprint backlog is:

• A subset of work items from the product backlog
• A group of items to work on during the next sprint

Here’s how the two backlogs meet: The product backlog provides work items for a sprint backlog. And, by the end of a sprint, the team might transfer incomplete work to the next sprint or the product backlog. If the work items have high priority, they should go into the next sprint. If not, they should go into the product backlog for a later sprint.

Essentially, a product backlog covers a greater amount of time than a sprint backlog. However, like the sprint backlog, the product backlog might evolve to reflect changes in the market or customer needs and, the development team needs both in order to deliver product changes.

Now, the sprint backlog isn't an off-the-shelf artifact that you can use in your project — every project is unique. So, someone must be responsible for populating the sprint backlog with work items.

Who owns and creates sprint backlogs?

Here are the team members involved in creating sprint backlogs:

• The Scrum Master. During the Sprint Planning ceremony, the Scrum Master uses the product backlog to create the sprint backlog — the output. However, the Scrum Master doesn't do it alone.
• The development team. When moving product backlog items to the sprint backlog, the Scrum Master considers the development team's input. ⚖️
• The Product Owner. The Scrum Master needs the Product Owner's agreement to include product backlog items in the sprint backlog. 👌 And if the development team has questions about the product backlog, the Product Owner is the one to ask.

The sprint backlog's creation is one part of the agile workflow that shows how essential teamwork is to agile. Nevertheless, the sprint backlog must always be owned by someone throughout the workflow. Otherwise, these artifacts can get lost and become outdated.

Scrum methodology says that the whole agile team owns the Sprint Backlog. And by "agile team," we mean the Scrum Master, the Product Owner, and the development team.

That’s because all agile team members contribute:

• The Product Owner knows what the development team should deliver by the end of the sprint. Plus, they order product backlog items by priority. In other words, the Product Owner constrains the product backlog items that should go into the next sprint backlog.
• The Scrum Master has enough experience to distribute the development team's work throughout the sprint. When considering sprint backlog item dependencies, that distribution makes the most sense.
• The development team knows how long similar Sprint Backlog items take to complete. ⏲️ This means they can determine the sprint goal's feasibility within a certain time frame.

Remember, the sprint backlog is a living document, so team members should update it as needed. Let’s look at how a sprint backlog can change.

Updating the sprint backlog

The sprint backlog should adapt to answer market trends and customer needs as they arise. Those changes might influence items in the product backlog and how they’re prioritized. As a result, the sprint backlog changes.

Let's have a look at what may cause a sprint backlog to change and who makes the updates:

1. Effort estimations were not accurate enough. If the development team realizes that some work items will take longer than expected, they should raise a 🚩. They should then negotiate the scope of the sprint backlog with the Product Owner without compromising the sprint goal.
2. A new, higher-priority user story, task, or bug comes up. If that happens, the development team should add it to the sprint backlog. That might impact the sprint's duration or push some items to the next sprint.
3. Progress in completing a user story or a task or solving a bug changes daily. As this happens, the development team should keep updating the remaining workload they estimated for the current sprint. And they should do it during the Daily Stand-Up or Daily Scrum meeting. Once the development team finishes all the work in the sprint backlog, they achieve the sprint goal. This means the development team implemented the product increment, which is ready for delivery. 📦
4. A sprint backlog item is no longer needed. This might be due to a shift in the market or customer needs. If that happens, the development team should remove the item from the artifact. 🗑️
5. The development team better understands sprint backlog requirements as the sprint continues. So, they might realize that to achieve the sprint goal, they need to include more items in the sprint backlog.

The sprint backlog: A guide for sprint success

A sprint backlog is a guide for completing a sprint goal. This means that its lifecycle is short and equals the iteration's duration. It's a visual representation of the sprint that supports Scrum team discussions on in-progress and to-do work.

This backlog may also be the most reassuring Scrum artifact for developers, as it assures them the work is organized and no additional work items will fall from the sky without their knowledge. If the workload must increase, the team will debate it and weigh the developers' experience-based opinion.

With a sprint backlog, the team perfects its ability to plan sprints, estimate effort, and allocate resources. They learn how long work takes and how much of it fits into a sprint. And by learning this, the team learns the resources they need to get to the finish line.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm is collaborative sprint planning tool that helps your team with the shared context that the story map format provides. TeamRhythm helps your team to:

• Visualize a meaningful picture of work on the user story map, sequenced into sprint swimlanes
• Create, estimate and prioritize user stories right on the story map
• See comitment at a glance with sprint statistics and sprint goals displayed on each swimlane

Try planning your sprints with Easy Agile TeamRhythm. We’re confident it will help your team collaborate even more seamlessly.

It's common knowledge in the world of digital marketing and eCommerce that personalization results in higher conversion rates, more engaged users, and a better overall brand experience for your customers. What's less common is personalization strategies based on purchase history, user behavior, and psychographic patterns identified across your customer base — these are known as user segmentation.

That's just a fancy way of saying that segmentation groups your customers by how they act, think, and feel. If you can identify these patterns, you can begin to anticipate your customers' needs and build personalized marketing campaigns and user flows.

Let’s say you added a first name to an email. That’s a beginning, but there’s a lot more to personalization strategies than using proper names. Developing deeper insights through segmentation allows for a hyper-targeted marketing strategy and more engaged users.

We'll dive into the weeds of user segmentation, give you some segmenting ideas, and show you how you can incorporate user segments into your Jira projects to help with your Sprint and release planning.

Product managers use Jira to plan based on user segments

If you're in product management, you're responsible for creating an organized product roadmap that aligns with the business goals for that time period. Visualizing the target audience represented in each sprint helps ensure you stay focused on the right functionality to meet your goals.

Often, user personas and customer journey maps are created before user segmenting gets underway. Rich personas and detailed journey maps not only provide valuable information to user experience teams, marketers, and product teams. They are the foundation for building different user segments.

Apply user segments to each stage of your customers' lifecycle, starting with their first contact with your brand, through purchase, onboarding, product usage, and eventually to churn. When personalized through a customer journey stage, marketing campaigns and product user flows enrich your customers' experience, ultimately increasing your profits and impressing your boss.

Lucky for you, Jira can help you do that. Here are some simple ways you can use Jira to organize work by user groups:

• Use labels and corresponding card colors identifying specific user segments.
• Add a custom field as a lifecycle or market segment(s) identifier.
• Create separate Jira projects based on segments.

Easy Agile User Story Maps and Personas are Jira add-ons. These Jira add-on apps are specifically designed to integrate Personas and Easy Agile User Story Maps into your Jira environment.

These tools allow Product Owners to better visualize and plan Sprints and releases with the appropriate balance of user stories for each customer segment. Create a persona for each segment within Jira and you can filter your Story Map by Persona.

User segmentation is as simple or complex as you make it

If you're at the “first name” stage of personalization, you've taken the first step toward building a personalized brand. But now, let’s get started on some basic user segmentation.

Before we get started, you need to understand two principles behind customer segmentation:

1. There is an infinite number of ways to segment your customer population. You'll need to do a lot of testing to figure out which segments return the best results for you.
2. A single customer can belong to multiple user segments. Nope, this isn't going to be a clean, one-to-one matching of customers and groups. But don't worry — we'll give you some tips on how to keep your segments organized.

Let's start by getting on the same page with what we mean by a segment. A user segment is a collection of users who have something in common. That's it.

Take a look at some typical methods of segmenting a user base:

• Geographic segmentation
  • Country, region, state, city, or neighborhood
• Demographic segmentation
  • Gender, age, race, religion, marital status, or family size
• Behavioral segmentation
  • Past purchases, preferred device (phone, tablet, or desktop), responses to marketing campaigns, or in-app feedback contributions
• Psychographic segmentation
  • Lifestyles, beliefs, value systems, interests, or opinions

As you can tell from this list, customer segmentation requires a significant amount of customer data. You probably have a lot of geographic and behavioral data already in your CRM or analytics tool.

Collecting demographic and psychographic data requires you to get more creative. While some customers readily offer this information, others are not so willing to disclose their personal details. Enticing those users through survey completion discounts, promising a more personalized experience, and analyzing social media interactions are a few ways to get a more complete demographic and psychographic disclosure from your user base.

Advanced user segmentation strategies

Basic segmentation is pretty straightforward. Once you've got that down, you'll want to move on to more advanced segmentation techniques to increase your targeting and results. This is where segmentation gets fun.

With advanced user segments, you begin to combine customer attributes across segments. For example, you may create a segment of users from Brooklyn Heights who own a specific product and typically purchase from their phone.

Let's take that example a step further. Suppose next, you create a segment of users from Brooklyn Heights who bought a specific product in the last 14 days, made their last two purchases from their phone, and have never responded to an email campaign. This segment seems like a prime candidate for an SMS campaign. Without segmentation, how would you know?

Another more advanced segmentation strategy if you have multiple products is combining product ownership, purchase history, and affinity data to create segments predicting the next purchase behavior.

An example of product affinity data would be customers who bought Product A also bought Product B 83% of the time.

Then, have your analytics team figure out the typical time lapse between the purchase of Product A and Product B.

Now, build your segments based on customers that bought Product A but have not yet purchased Product B. Your segments will include users that purchased A in the last 30 days, 31-60 days ago, and more than 60 days ago. (Your data will tell you the real numbers based on purchase history patterns within your customer base.)

These segments are ready for everything from targeted campaigns to customers most likely to purchase Product B. Trust us, your boss is gonna love this stuff!

We hope you're starting to see how to get more specific and include more attributes as your segmentation strategy gets more complex and more targeted. We recommend you start generally gradually add complexity to your user segments.

Because your segments are basically filters through which you view your customers, the more you segment, the smaller your population becomes. Customizing a campaign or user experience flow for a population of 50 when you have 5 million customers just doesn't make sense. Gradually adding complexity will let you know when you've gone too far and your population is too small.

Quick tip: Derived versus explicit data

When it comes to specific data attributes for your user segments, don't forget to think about derived versus implicit data. Derived data is presumed based on other explicit data.

Let us explain. Say you are building a music app and one of your user segments is jazz music fans. If a customer completes a form and tells you she loves jazz music, you explicitly know that she is a jazz music fan.

However, if a customer hasn't given you that information, but her music purchase history includes repeated purchases of songs from jazz musicians, you can derive that she is probably a jazz fan.

Think of derived data as a way to combine explicit data that allows you to make some actionable assumptions.

Release the power of segmentation through Jira

By now, you can probably see that user segmentation creates richer personalization experiences for your customers, which garners higher profits and better retention. And with Jira at the top of Gartner's list of agile planning tools, you might be able to use these tips on creating a user segmentation strategy with Jira.

Remember the steps to maximizing your customer and market segmentation strategies:

1. Create rich personas and detailed customer journey maps.
2. Use personas, journey maps, and internal user data to build meaningful customer segments.
3. Build personal marketing campaigns and user experiences for specific user segments.

In Jira, you can visualize, organize, and plan your product work with your user segments in mind. Combined with a roadmap app, Jira is a great tool that allows you to measure and report on the value delivered by each of your user segments.

At Easy Agile, we live by our name — making agile easy is our mission. Go ahead and check out our Jira apps: Easy Agile Personas, Easy Agile User Story Maps, and a flexible Easy Agile Roadmaps.

There are infinite learning opportunities available when it comes to using Jira to help you make the most of the tool. From Jira tutorials to Udemy courses to an Atlassian certification, you can continue to hone your skills and learn from others.

There’s always more to discover. Brush up on skills, advance your career, and gain certificates that can land you your dream job. Continued learning can make you an indispensable MASTER of all things Jira within your organization and around the world.

Read our list of recommended Jira tutorials, training, and certifications that will start you on the path to Jira mastery.

Why agile teams choose Jira

Jira is an agile project management tool developed by Atlassian. It began as a software development application for devops teams but has evolved to help modern workplaces practicing agile methodologies augment their process.

The software is widely used for bug tracking, issue tracking, and addressing performance improvements based on real-time data. And the online functionality reduces the physical dependencies of managing a project as a team — something that grows more important to businesses every year.

Fun fact: The name Jira is the truncation of Gojira, the Japanese name for Godzilla. Atlassian recommends yelling it loudly as if you were charging into battle!

Jira is widely used by nearly every development team because it takes a customer-first approach to designing products. Jira allows for extensive customization to help teams meet the needs of their customers.

How to choose the Jira learning that's best for you

Follow these tips when selecting how to receive further Jira training and education:

• If you are pursuing training to advance your career, you may want proof of course completion, either from an Atlassian University training course or a Udemy course, to provide potential employers.
• If you are interested in becoming an Atlassian Certified Professional, you’ll need certification through Atlassian University.
• If cost is a barrier, begin with the free tutorials available from Atlassian University.

Jira tutorials, training, and certifications from Atlassian

Our list will begin with learning opportunities from Atlassian University (since they know Jira best), and then we’ll expand to tutorials, training, and courses from other online sources below.

Atlassian University

Atlassian offers several free Jira tutorials for both beginners and pros, so you can gain confidence with product skills that cover exactly what you need to get started and beyond. The Jira tutorials are clearly labeled with a timestamp to help you plan your schedule.

Each short Jira tutorial is grouped into a series based on a range of topics, beginning with the very basic to the more specific, including:

• Getting started with boards in Jira Software
• Jira Essentials with Agile Mindset
• Getting More from Jira Workflows
• Automating Jira

Some tutorial series are short enough to complete on a lunch break, whereas others will take a few hours. So instead of doomscrolling while you eat your sandwich, pull up a quick tutorial to advance your skills! 🥪

If you hope to earn a certification, but you’re not entirely sure which specific training courses will get you there, Atlassian has role-based learning paths to guide you on your way.

Atlassian University — Jira certifications

To finally and officially cement yourself as a Jira Jedi Master, you can become an Atlassian Certified Professional and the go-to expert for all things Jira. Plus, all Atlassian certifications are globally recognized, so wherever you find yourself, Atlassian will be with you.

A number of different certifications are available depending on your chosen skillset. To achieve a certification, you’ll need to take the courses available through the above training link, gain real-world experience, and take an exam.

Other Jira tutorials, training, and courses

While Atlassian University is filled with learning opportunities, plenty of other resources will help you grow from beginner to expert and from expert to master.

Top Udemy Jira courses

Udemy Jira courses offer a wide variety of topics at a range of prices for those just starting out with Jira and old pros. Students can access broader topics like agile and project management as well as Professional Scrum Master (PSM) courses to prepare you for your certification.

Courses come with a rating based on the experience of past students. And considering that over 200,000 students are learning Jira on Udemy, you’ll be able to see which courses are well-reviewed to help you decide.

From beginner crash courses to more advanced or niche topics, there’s something for everyone. They also offer free “bite-sized” Jira lessons with videos 3 to 11 minutes long, so you can fit them into any busy schedule. Plus, all courses come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Expium’s Atlassian courses

Expium offers workshop-based Jira training for enterprise Atlassian customers. The courses aim to equip students to competently configure Jira with a range of workshops covering beginner basics to more specific topics.

The hands-on learning is available for public, private, or online classes. Expium is a Platinum Solution Partner, which means, according to Atlassian, they meet the highest training criteria and have a proven practice that can scale from small to large customers.

Guru 99 Jira tutorial: How to use Jira software for beginners

Guru 99’s free online resource is for beginners as well as those who need to brush up on the basics. It provides a step-by-step guide for using the Jira dashboard.

The resource outlines detailed use cases with annotated screenshots from the Jira tool. The detailed imagery shows the basics of creating issues and managing issue attributes as well as more specific uses, like how to set up workflows, clone issues, and create custom fields.

Guru 99’s Jira tutorial includes:

• Jira issues and issue types, such as new features, sub-tasks, bugs, etc.
• Jira issue attributes, such as in progress, open, closed, resolved, etc.
• Jira components
• How to create issues in Jira
• How to create sub-tasks, workflows, plugins, epics, and clones
• Security schemes and permission schemes
• Jira reporting and burndown charts
• How to generate a pie chart of priorities

Now it’s time to get out there and learn! Successful people know that learning never stops.

Bonus resource: Continue learning on the Easy Agile blog

And hey, we’ve got extensive learning resources on our Easy Agile blog, too! From understanding the difference between Kanban and Scrum, using epics to maximize performance, and knowing best practices for Jira workflows; you're in the right place.

Easy Agile is dedicated to helping teams work better with agile. Our apps for Jira are designed to keep the customer top of mind through every step of the product development process. They’re simple, collaborative, and made by a development team that lives and breathes Jira.

Contact our team to learn more or request a demo tutorial to see our plugins in action.

Kanban vs. Scrum — are they different, and can software and product development use them together? The answer to both questions is YES!

Both Kanban and Scrum are popular agile methodologies. They are different, but they can be used together. They are each part of agile, a better way of working that focuses on iteration and collaboration to reduce waste and maximize efficiency.

Agile is the antithesis of classical project management. Think of it like jazz vs classical music. Rather than one composer bringing an already composed and organized piece of music to an orchestra and dictating what happens where, jazz is collaborative, each band member feeds off of each other, creating music in an agile, iterative process.

This post will take a deep dive into both Kanban and Scrum methodologies. Continue reading to discover the differences and similarities between Kanban vs. Scrum, and learn how they can be effectively used together.

How is the agile methodology different from project management?

The traditional project management methodology is linear, meaning each project element is completed in sequential order. Only when each element is completed can you move onto the next one. Think of traditional project management as an assembly line. It has a strict succession of steps that are planned out by the project manager before any new work or iterations can begin.

The project manager is the person the entire team depends on for leadership. The flow of work remains the same from project to project, and the steps rarely evolve.

By contrast, agile is a non-linear way of working that focuses on flexibility and collaboration between team members. Agile project management focuses on getting something completed that stakeholders can see and evaluate on a regular basis, so value is continuously provided.

Each iteration yields new, actionable insights from both the team and the customer about what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change. It’s a multifaceted approach that eliminates the bottlenecks that can arise in the traditional method.

Kanban vs. Scrum

Kanban vs. Scrum is not a dichotomy. They are both agile methodologies designed to help teams work in an iterative process. They are both systems that are regularly used in the development process to ensure a value-driven approach. The goals and methodology are the same, but the steps are different.

A Kanban workflow is a way to visually organize tasks that ensures work items move forward while allowing changes and adjustments to be made along the way. A scrum works in 2-4 week sprints designed to complete a set amount of work or solve a specific problem. Throughout each sprint, teams check in daily to ensure progress and to identify any possible roadblocks.

Kanban vs. Scrum isn’t a one or the other choice. Both might be used at the same time, depending on what’s required of projects or user stories. Learn more about the differences and similarities of these two methods below.

Kanban vs. Scrum: Kanban methodology

Kanban was originally utilized by Taiichi Ohno, an engineer at Toyota, as a lean manufacturing system that decreased waste and increased efficiency. The Kanban method is a task management tool designed to maximize efficiency by visualizing all of the required work and limiting works in progress.

Work items are represented visually on Kanban boards so that every team member can see the state of each piece of work at any given time. It enables real-time communication and full transparency between team members since each work item is intentionally assigned. A Trello board is a simple example of a Kanban.

How to use Kanban

With a Kanban, work flows visually through various stages of completion to promote cohesive collaboration and real-time communication across teams. In its simplest form, a Kanban is a To-Do, Doing, and Done board. Work moves from one section to the next on a physical or digital Kanban board, depending on how far along the specific task is.

To solve more complex problems, which is usually the case in software development, a Kanban can become more advanced with added layers for specific clients, products, or deliverables.

A key aspect of the Kanban methodology is that each person is only allowed to work on one task at a time. This ensures no aspect ever moves too far forward without working in unison with the rest of the tasks on deck. The one-at-a-time system identifies critical connections between tasks as well as potential roadblocks that could cause delays.

Encouraging cross-functional teams to intentionally identify work items ensures tasks are appropriately prioritized. It also combats the negative effects of multitasking, allowing developers to zero in on one task at a time.

Kanban vs. Scrum: Scrum methodology

Scrum, sometimes called a “scrumban,” is based on empiricism and lean thinking. Empiricism is the belief that knowledge comes from hands-on experience and objective, observable facts. Lean thinking focuses on the essentials, bringing value to individuals while eliminating waste. A scrum uses real-time collaboration over theorization to provide a lightweight framework for solving complex problems.

The Scrum process uses an interactive and incremental approach that manages risk and enhances predictability through set intervals of iteration called sprints. The sprints yield an imperfect but valuable version of a product the team can quickly bring to stakeholders, whose feedback is then integrated into the next sprint. The sprints continue until the desired outcome or product is achieved.

How to use Scrum

A Scrum takes place over a set amount of time called a sprint. Each sprint generally takes two weeks to a maximum of four weeks to complete. The important part is that the time frame is set before the Scrum begins.

There are three main components of a Scrum:

1. Roles: The people

• Product owner
• Scrum master
• Development team

2. Artifacts: What gets done

• Product backlog
• Sprint backlog
• Increments

3. Ceremonies: Recurring events

• Sprint planning
• Daily Scrum
• Sprint review
• Sprint retrospective

The product owner orders and prioritizes backlog items, which are the aspects of a product that need completion. At the beginning of a Scrum, the product owner designates which artifacts from the product backlog move to the sprint backlog. The sprint backlog represents the goals and the desired outcomes of the upcoming sprint.

💡 Use Easy Agile TeamRhythm to transform flat product backlogs into impactful, visual representations.

The Scrum master helps everyone understand Scrum theory and practice. They are responsible for the effectiveness of the Scrum team. Throughout the 2-4 week sprint, the team focuses on the backlog, checking in for daily scrums or daily stand-ups. During these Scrum meetings, team members share what story points they completed, what story points they will complete next, as well as any roadblocks that stand in the way.

Deliverables are produced on a regular basis, and adjustments are made along the way as needed. A Scrum board or Kanban board might be used to help teams visualize their progress throughout the sprint.

Ceremonies are the recurring events held by Scrum teams cycling through on a 2-4 week basis. A Scrum begins with a short planning phase, then the work begins. The Scrum team meets daily to review progress and make changes as needed.

At the end of each sprint, a sprint review is held with stakeholders or clients to ensure value is being met, and continuous improvements are pushed forward. Lastly, a retrospective meeting takes place with the project owner, scrum master, and development team to review the past two weeks, including successes, key metrics, and challenges to be addressed before the next sprint begins.

Using Kanban and Scrum together

It doesn't need to be Kanban vs. Scrum — they can work together. A development team might choose to use the Kanban system within a Scrum to provide a visual representation of work moving forward throughout each sprint.

They are both valuable systems in your agile toolkit that work together to provide prioritization, collaboration, and constant value delivery. So, you don’t ever have to choose between Kanban vs. Scrum. Save the decision-making for the real problems, like what to put on the pizzas you order for your team. 🍕

A Scrum framework provides designated blocks of time for teams to complete a specific deliverable or set of deliverables while providing daily Scrum meetings to ensure cohesion and advancement. The Kanban system will ensure tasks are taken on one at a time in an evolving, visual process.

Learn the ways of the Scrum with Easy Agile

Easy Agile crafts solutions to make every agile team more effective. We help teams build simple and collaborative user story maps in Jira for backlog grooming, version planning, and silky-smooth sprints.

We believe there is a better way to work, and we want to help teams just like yours. Learn more about our suite of agile apps and follow our blog for the latest agile trends, tips, and more.

Just as you looking at a physical map before a road trip helps you understand the legs of each journey, roadmaps help agile teams understand their workloads for the upcoming months. Jira roadmaps offer further benefits, such as timeline visualization and the ability to share relevant information with external stakeholders.

In this article, we'll unpack the purpose of product roadmaps and whether they’re all the same, as well as why Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira is the simplest roadmapping tool for Jira. You’ll discover how roadmaps help Product Owners, agile team members, customers, and stakeholders. You'll also understand the difference between roadmaps and Gantt charts.

Let’s start with discussing the purpose of roadmaps for agile teams.

Why does an agile team need a roadmap?

Roadmaps help agile teams define their big chunks of work and when to complete them by. It’s an artifact to communicate with the team, customers, and other project stakeholders.

With roadmaps, agile team members have a sense of their journey for the next 3-6 or even 12 months. By understanding this journey, teams can better understand their product’s evolution.

If you’re a Product Owner, roadmaps are a great way for you to:

• Demonstrate that you understand company goals
• Show the C suite and the agile team that you're aware of customer needs
• Show you know how to deliver a valuable product to your customers while meeting your company's goals

Roadmaps are also a great way to remind you and your team how their work fits into the bigger picture. They give you an opportunity to motivate and help team members.

Also, by breaking down epics into user stories in the product backlog, Product Owners and the development team can better prioritize, schedule, and assign resources to those work items.

Now that we've covered the basics of Jira roadmaps, let's take a look at how to adapt them for different roles.

Tailoring roadmaps to meet specific needs

Different people on the team will need different views of roadmaps. Some roles focus on analyzing specific roadmap items of roadmaps, and other roles focus on different parts.

The development team needs roadmaps with expected release dates, milestones, and a detailed customer value explanation.

You may prioritize roadmap items by customer value, which makes sense when considering the customer-first agile methodology.

Often, development teams have roadmaps organized by sprints and work items arranged on a timeline. A work item can be a user story, a task, or a bug.

The C suite uses roadmaps to map the work of development teams onto company goals and metrics.

Those roadmaps display work items organized by month or quarter. This organization helps track progress over time and draw conclusions on goal achievement.

When roadmapping for the C suite, you don't need to worry about providing them with detailed work item descriptions.

The sales staff relies on roadmaps to learn about new features and customer value. That kind of information can help improve sales conversion. Roadmaps are a great way for the sales staff to understand upcoming developments they can get customers excited about.

You should also do your best to offer visually appealing and highly readable roadmaps to your customers. They'll look for a prioritized overview of new features.

Jira roadmaps might help you deliver these different types of roadmaps.

Jira roadmaps

Atlassian included roadmaps in next-gen Jira software. Jira roadmaps allow you to define and organize items in a timeline and keep them up-to-date. You can even share the work status with stakeholders.

But the coolest thing about roadmaps in Jira is that it syncs with the developers' work.

As the scope of a project can change while agile teams are working, it can get tricky to maintain an up-to-date roadmap, especially if you’ve been using a static tool like Excel or Confluence. Thankfully, Jira roadmaps allow you to quickly and easily update the work status and item priorities.

Agile teams can attach user stories to the Jira project on which they're working. As a result, Jira software updates the actual work in their roadmap.

You can also use Jira software to break down roadmap items, or epics, which means dividing work into small chunks. And as if this wasn't enough fun, you can use Jira Software's drag-and-drop functionality to adjust item priorities in the timeline. Consequently, Jira Software automatically adjusts the dates in the epics.

These are a few more reasons why Jira roadmaps are worth checking out. They offer:

• Stakeholder collaboration in creating and maintaining the roadmap
• The ability to share information with external stakeholders
• Increased availability and visibility to team members
• Tight links between a team's work and the roadmap
• Seamless item update ability
• Project status visualization
• Both high-level and detailed item descriptions
• Connections between Jira issue dates and dates on the roadmap

Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira can help shape your roadmap as a timeline with swimlanes based on work themes or teams. Drag and drop items on the timeline to set when the team will begin and end working on them. You can also:

• Define milestones
• Filter the roadmap’s view
• Track epic completion progress
• Share a PDF version of the roadmap with stakeholders

Before you go, we should get on the same page about Gantt charts vs. roadmaps.

What are Gantt charts?

When we say “Gantt charts are useful for agile teams,” you might immediately think, “That can’t be right!” 😮 However, Gantt charts can be useful in the right context. They’re just not very agile.

The Gantt chart, named for the chart’s creator, Henry Lawrence Gantt, provides a graphic schedule for planning and visualizing tasks organized by project stages.

Project managers use Gantt charts to manage task dependencies and the critical path. This path is the sequence of tasks that team members must execute on time to not compromise the project’s end date.

Simply put, if you’re building a data center, you have to define the order in which the team must execute tasks. Basically, the team can’t start some tasks before completing others.

Now, let’s clarify why roadmaps are agile, whereas Gantt charts are not.

Why Gantt charts and roadmaps are not interchangeable

At first glance, Gantt charts seem similar to roadmaps. However, at their core, they serve different purposes and audiences.

Gantt charts assume that team members will complete work in a linear fashion. This means that the execution of some tasks depends on the execution of other tasks. And any modification to the schedule can compromise the project’s end date, so you should avoid task rescheduling and frequently track the execution of tasks.

This is why the linearity of Gantt charts goes against the very principles of agile. 🛑

The agile methodology originated from the need to address the inefficiencies of traditional project management practices in software development. One of those methodologies is the waterfall methodology.

Agile teams do adaptive planning and deliver outcomes on an ongoing basis. They also focus on continuous improvement. That’s why no Gantt chart would fit into an agile workflow.

Gantt charts follow a linear delivery model with lots of task dependencies, which tends to be slow. 🐌

On the other hand, the agile workflow has shorter development cycles — iterations — with frequent deliveries and the bare minimum task dependencies. That speeds up continuous improvement. Additionally, agile teams adapt their roadmaps very well to ever-changing priorities and requirements.

Roadmaps are good, but Jira roadmaps are awesome

Jira roadmaps like Easy Agile Roadmaps help order work items by priority and update their statuses. Stakeholders can make collaborative edits on roadmaps in Jira, which is very convenient.

Perhaps the greatest feature of Jira roadmaps is that developers can both track work in Jira Software user stories and through the tasks on those roadmaps. From the Product Owner's perspective, the benefit is how they visualize the developers' work and communicate it with stakeholders.

It’s really important to make sure that both the C suite and the agile team buy into the roadmap. If they don’t, you might not be aligning your team’s work with company goals and customer needs.

Keep in mind that roadmaps’ benefits work two ways: Team members better realize how they contribute to achieving company goals, and you can monitor that process.

Try our Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira. Whether you’re following the Scrum framework or the Kanban framework, it’ll help you organize your team’s work items in a timeline, define milestones, and track progress.

We often get questions about why product roadmaps are considered an agile tool. To some, it seems quite “un-agile” to set concrete dates for a long list of tasks you will likely never get done.

That assumption couldn’t be more wrong. It presumes that a product roadmap is an old, overdone practice more akin to Waterfall predecessors like the *cough*Gantt Chart *cough*. This is not the case. Gantt Charts are for task dependency, and they assume that work will be completed in a linear fashion.

On the other hand, a true product roadmap is completely subject to change. It’s a living document meant to serve as a guide. The roadmap shows what a team needs to accomplish to create specific features or otherwise complete tasks that will provide the most value to customers in a certain timeframe.

This flexibility allows product development teams to make the most informed choices. To help teams do this, we built the simplest and most flexible roadmapping tool for Jira (more on this later). Here, you’ll learn about the benefits of using product roadmaps, the guiding principles of the roadmapping process, and how to use roadmapping tools effectively.

What is an agile product roadmap?

Agile is a broad term for a non-linear way of working that prioritizes flexibility and collaboration. This working style helps teams iterate as they go rather than stick to a rigid plan that doesn’t adapt to new information.

Think of agile as the complete opposite of an assembly line process for making a product. An assembly line has a strict plan where one step happens after the next. Each piece falls into place one after another without extra input or iteration.

🖍 Great for an assembly line of Crayola products, not so great for software development. 📱

Rather than use the assembly line approach, agile teams work collaboratively and iteratively on new products in order to detect roadblocks early, before they can cause a delay. And, Product teams use agile tools to provide clients and stakeholders value on a consistent basis.

Basically, agile product roadmaps are key to producing a great product.

They provide a smooth and collaborative planning process for development teams while maintaining the strategic objectives and product vision stakeholders expect. On top of all that, the flexibility provided by agile product roadmapping delights customers by consistently meeting their evolving needs, whims, and desires.

The benefits of roadmapping for product management

There are many benefits of roadmapping for everyone involved. Roadmapping assists product managers, helps the development team collaborate, gives stakeholders a clear view of the process, and ensures customers are continually pleased with product features and functionality.

Effective roadmap tools can provide the following benefits:

• Enable teams to align their vision around product features
• Provide a clear visual of the most critical prioritizations
• Ensure short-term product goals are met as soon as possible while monitoring and adjusting long-term goals
• Align all team members on what’s most important at any given time
• Keep track of specific product launch and release dates
• Maintain the product vision and business goals
• Ensure all stakeholders can view and give feedback on the current product plan
• Ship a product and solve issues relatively quickly
• Bring constant value to stakeholders and customers

For most teams, it’s truly the beating heart of product development.

4 guiding principles to get the most out of your product roadmaps

We’re obsessed with roadmapping and the many agile strategies that help teams work more effectively. So, we pulled together a list of the most important guiding principles that will ensure your agile team gets the most out of your product roadmap.

1. Focus on themes of work, not features

In the simplest form, themes represent high-level groups of work (like epics). In an agile product roadmap, themes should be customer-focused, unlike traditional waterfall roadmaps where themes tend to focus on business objectives.

Examples of themes include:

• Customer onboarding experience
• Reducing tech debt
• Customer satisfaction and engagement

By grouping work into themes, teams are able to tell a story about where they are headed as well as the goals, objectives, and outcomes that will get them there. User stories provide high-level visualization so that teams can answer critical questions:

• What are we doing?
• Why are we doing it?
• How does it link back to our Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)?

2. Think of the roadmap as a living document

Product managers need to educate their stakeholders on the true purpose of the product roadmap to manage expectations and ensure everyone is on the same page.

A product roadmap is not a promise. It’s a living document that’s meant to serve as a flexible guide.

You need to teach all stakeholders that the roadmap represents chunks of work, such as new features, functionality, and metrics customers value most at a specific period of time. It’s inevitable and expected that customer needs and preferences will change. The roadmap should be adjusted and amended to reflect these changes as time goes by.

The agile product development process should change to maximize the value customers experience. This is what it’s all about!

3. Actively collaborate with stakeholders

Involve everyone in the process, including internal stakeholders, external stakeholders, and the full development team when planning, reviewing, or adjusting the roadmap.

The product manager doesn’t need to be the only one representing the customer’s voice. By gaining the perspective of developers, the sales team, customer support, and engineers, you get a holistic view of the customer experience. This will give you a clear view of what your customers value to determine what should be done when.

4. Ensure the roadmap is accessible to all stakeholders

The product roadmap should be the team’s single source of truth, representing the plan of execution against the company's Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

Understanding what’s going on and why each person is doing what they’re doing is crucial to establishing transparency and confidence in your team.

The roadmap represents the team’s overall vision for a period of time. Ensuring the roadmap is accessible to all stakeholders achieves organizational alignment.

Product strategy with Easy Agile roadmaps for Jira

We teased above that we’d tell you more about Easy Agile Roadmaps. We designed the simplest and most flexible roadmapping tool for Jira. Our roadmap software helps teams align around a product vision to sequence the most critical features for customer delivery.

Easy Agile Roadmaps are designed for everyone involved in the product development process from the product manager to the dev team to key stakeholders and customers. It works seamlessly with both Scrum and Kanban Jira Software boards. And, of course, it’s completely agile. Like, Simone Biles flexible.

Say goodbye to clunky Excel sheets, one-off Powerpoint presentations, and static Gantt Charts. Easy Agile Roadmaps can create a visual roadmap timeline that’s flexible, iterative, and easy to use. Split scheduled work, add date markers, use Quick Filters, track your progress, and export the roadmap as needed. The tool uses a simple drag-and-drop functionality for a clean user experience, no matter the needs of your team.

We’re so sure you’ll love it, you can try it free for 30 days. If you have any questions, our team is ready and waiting to hear from you, or watch an on-demand demo of our roadmapping app in action.

Raise your hand if you've ever had an argument, oops 😳 — I mean a heated discussion — on how to set up and organize Jira. Yeah, us too.

Some hotly contested topics include:

• Project: Is it best to organize by team, by function, by feature, or by product?
• Agile epics, features, stories, tasks, sub-tasks, bugs — what should you use and when?
• Sprint board column headings and swimlanes — we're not even going there.

Unfortunately, there isn't one best workflow in Jira or any tool your agile team uses. More important than your workflow is setting up your team members to consistently deliver business value to your end-users. The goal of your agile project management is to enable and support your Scrum team in this endeavor.

We're going to take a look at one aspect of your process — through the epics agile teams use. Stick with us, and we'll explain what an epic is, why agile epics are important, and how to avoid some epic mistakes.

What is an epic?

Simply put, an epic is a bucket that holds smaller work items that must be completed to satisfy the task. Some people think of epics as a big user story. That's fine if it helps you visualize it, but epics are quite different from stories.

• Agile teams use epics differently for planning or not at all.
  While your team might be able to give it a t-shirt size, the amount of work in an epic is usually too large to be estimated in story points. Some epics are so large that they need to be broken down into smaller epics before you even ask for team estimates.
• An epic isn't written like a user story.
  You know the template — “As a user, I want to X so that I can Y.” That’s perfect for a user story, but not so much for an epic. An epic example might be "Add cross-sells" with a description that lists places where the Product Owner would like to present the end-user with opportunities to purchase related products. That’s not a story, but a request for functionality.
• The epic might be acting as a placeholder for work that is yet to be defined.
  Your Product Owner may use epics as placeholders on a product roadmap for long-term planning. They'll wait to define the work until the implementation time frame is closer.
• An epic is rarely completed in a single sprint.
  Because of their size, epics typically don't fit within one iteration. Your software development team slices functionality so they can deliver working software each sprint. This may mean they complete a story or two from an epic for two sprints, skip a sprint, and then go back to stories in that epic the next sprint.
• Epics may or may not have acceptance criteria.
  Some Scrum teams don't require epics to have acceptance criteria because it's included in the stories. If all the child stories meet what the Scrum defines as the Definition of Done, the epic is also Done.

Epics are parents and grandparents to stories and tasks. Development teams don't work on epics but rather code to the smaller user stories under the epic.

The importance of epics in your agile practice

Don't underestimate the organizational value epics bring to your product backlog. Corralling 10 or 20 related backlog items can be disruptive in sprint planning. Epics present a more cohesive look at the work and allow your Scrum team to see the big picture.

Epics offer executives and product managers a high-level overview of work in progress and what’s coming in the future.

Product Owners use epics to create a product plan from a business perspective. Current business goals may dictate that development work is focused on a particular feature represented by epics. By contrast, epics also help Product Owners plan sprints with an appropriate work ratio from multiple epics. Product Owners can take a step back from the detailed user stories and make sure each iteration contains stories from several epics to satisfy multiple stakeholders.

The way epics are visually represented in product backlogs and roadmaps is critical for long-term planning. Can you imagine planning a six-month roadmap at the user story level? It would be chaos!

Agile frameworks encourage — no — demand the ability to adjust course as needed to meet changing stakeholder needs, market demands, and business goals. Epics allow you to easily and quickly adapt your roadmaps in response to change.

How epics add value to agile development

Discovery is a big aspect of agile methodologies and product management. At the beginning of this process, your teams will be event storming, creating personas, and building journey maps. The actionable output of those activities is easily logged and organized in Jira with epics.

As those epics are further refined, they're added to a roadmap and then put on a Refinement ceremony agenda. During Refinement, the Scrum team members engage in user story mapping exercises and begin to build the detail needed for the development team to execute.

While epics provide a less detailed view of features and requests from your Product Owner, they are critical to the creation of user stories. Without the cohesive view of your sprint backlog presented through epics, agile sprints are at risk of delivering a lot of unrelated work that delivers little value.

When not to use an epic

So, while we love the agile epic, it's not perfect for everything. Here are some things to avoid when using epics.

The evergreen epic

You know the one. The epic was created when people stopped using wired telephone lines and has been lingering in your backlog in a semi-complete state ever since. Deep within, you'll find user stories and tasks, maybe with little or no relation to each other. This poor epic has become the dumping ground for orphaned stories that didn't find a home anywhere else.

Evergreen epics can be the result of a change in either business goals or product features. That’s great — you've adapted! Now you need to update your epic to reflect that. Stories can be removed, code can be deployed or shelved, and incomplete stories can be deleted or removed from the epic and reprioritized.

Brainstorming is also a cause for evergreen epics. Above, we mentioned that output from UX activities is a great way to manage actionable items. We did not say to use epics as a home for every idea that came up during brainstorming that may or may not ever make it to your roadmap.

Epics are not intended to live forever. They represent a body of work that will deliver value to your end-users and need to be completed so you can measure the results of your efforts. Evergreen epics clutter your roadmap, blurring your focus, and limiting its planning value.

The theme epic

It's easy to assign stories to epics because they're related to a specific area in the product, touch a certain code base, or satisfy an individual or group of stakeholders. That's not the purpose of an epic. Themes are a better choice for grouping work by attributes other than a specific feature implementation.

You can accomplish your organizational goals by using themes to link these stories while maintaining the integrity of scope within your epic.

Use epics to focus on specific deliverables or features. Related or not, if a story within an epic doesn't contribute to the primary focus of the epic, remove it. That doesn't mean it's not important or the right work to do during the iteration. It just means it's not part of that epic.

Being diligent about epic scope keeps your estimates cleaner and more useful for future planning. Unnecessary stories in epics inflate their estimates and actual efforts. If you ever need to look back at older work items, you probably won't remember that adding two unrelated stories was what bumped an epic from a medium to a large. If you’re using that old work item as a guide for future planning, you’ve just overestimated the effort because you didn’t limit the scope to the objective of the epic.

Keep in mind — not every story needs an epic parent. Some stories stand well on their own and might be better visualized and planned through themes.

The release epic

A release is not an epic. A release is a specific set of code and files that are bundled together and delivered to production at the same time. A release may include an epic or many epics, or it may not. But in itself, a release is not an epic.

There are excellent tools on the market developed specifically to help you with release management. By all means, assign your epics to a release, but use release tools to organize your releases and use epics to organize your features.

Epics are more than a large user story

Your agile coach or Scrum Master has probably drilled you on the Principles of Agile Software, so you know the following quote from the 12 Principles of Agile Software:

"Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done — is essential."

But what does it have to do with epics?

Epics simplify your backlog. They allow you to focus on the right things at the right time and keep out the noise. They keep your eye on the ball when it comes to prioritizing value and ignoring the ankle-biter work in your backlog.

We believe using epics makes for better organization in your backlog and better planning for your agile teams. Epics help you deliver value sooner by keeping you focused on the big picture and out of the weeds.

If you want a more contextual view of your epics and user stories in Jira, try Easy Agile TeamRhythm. The highly-visual story map format transforms the flat Jira backlog into a meaningful picture of work, making it easier to manage your backlog and plan sprints or versions.

There's a lot in common between a Product Manager and the executive president of a professional sports club. Don't buy it? Well, you should 😋, and here's why.

• Both are experts in their businesses.
• They both know what it takes to win. 🏆
• They're great leaders of their teams.

Stay tuned because this article will give you a grasp of how unique the product management role is. You'll learn what their responsibilities are and more.

And if you landed a job opportunity as Product Manager, we'll give you a hand with mastering your craft. 🥇

But first things first: defining the role. And once you know this, we’ll move on to exploring their tasks, unique characteristics, and the challenges they face.

What's a product manager?

For context, let's start with product management’s role in PI (Product Increment) Planning.

According to our Guide to PI Planning, the Product Manager must understand the customer needs and validate solutions against those needs. That’s the starting point and foundation for their role. But that's still generic. 🤔

The Product Manager is THE product expert. That makes them the best-equipped team member to make strategic decisions about the product. These decisions affect the work of a lot of people in a company.

The Product Manager is a product visionary and strategist. They monitor and analyze the market competition. That's how they define a unique product vision and product strategy. Their ultimate goal is to add unique value to the market based on customer needs.

The Product Manager decides what products or product features to build and in what order. This means they prioritize new products or new features in an existing product. Defining a product vision and a product strategy is intimately related to prioritization. They must do their best effort to maximize both customer value and business value. Not an easy challenge!

The Product Manager leads the teams responsible for developing a new product or improving an existing one. They usually work across cross-functional teams, so leading them demands a great deal of organization from the Product Manager. Plus, they need the ability to bridge, communicate with, and supervise engineering, marketing, sales, and customer support staff.

The Product Manager participates in all stages of product development, from planning and conception to launch or release. But what tasks do they do?

The product manager's tasks

You already know some of the product management tasks. But here's a comprehensive list of product management tasks:

• Understand, identify, and, if necessary, represent customer pain points and business challenges.
• Manage the process of generating new ideas for products or features, and decide which ideas to move forward with.
• Describe a product vision, and align all teams with that vision, especially in large companies.
• Create and maintain the product roadmap.
• Design a strategy for product development.
• Limit the project scope.
• Rank features against the product strategy, business goals, customer value, and customer or user feedback.
• Specify the requirements for each feature.
• Define the launch or release process, which comprises phases and milestones.
• Manage dependencies within and between phases.
• Identify the deliverables and corresponding due dates for the cross-functional teams.
• Coordinate the activities of each team from product development until launching the product into the market.
• Validate product design and implementation.
• Ensure the successful launch or release of the product.

Now, are you working with Scrum? If so, you might be wondering about the differences between the Product Manager and the Product Owner.

Product managers vs. product owners

Although they may interchange tasks, they're distinct roles. In short, the latter works towards realizing the product vision and the product strategy that the first defines.

The Product Owner works more closely with the software development team. On the other hand, the Product Manager interfaces directly with customers, users, and partners.

Sometimes, when there's no Product Manager, the Product Owner steps into this role. However, in that case, there's little time to coordinate the work of all teams around the same product vision.

But regardless of whether there’s an existing Product Owner, there are key ingredients that make good and great Product Managers. Let's discuss that next.

What makes a great product manager?

The characteristics of a great Product Manager consist of technical skills and personality traits. So, besides technical skills, they should have a high EQ (emotional coefficient). This means:

• Showing customers and users empathy during any communication with them
• Developing trustworthy relationships with internal teams and external stakeholders
• Inspiring and motivating team members
• Discretely persuading people to take the necessary steps to achieve a common goal, which starts with listening to them
• Avoiding bias in the preference for solutions by being user-centric and ensuring that solutions answer user needs
• Managing stress and performing well under pressure
• Demonstrating the urgency of task completion without causing panic
• Knowing how to ask the best questions to the right people at the right time
• Delegating the power of decision-making by giving teams a methodology and criteria for escalating if needed
• Daring to confidently make strong statements about priorities, advocating for any of their decisions
• Having the courage to choose whom to favor with a decision, whether it’s engineering, marketing, or sales
• Not being afraid of changes such as defining a new product strategy for business growth
• Reading the emotions of customers, users, and internal team members, and capturing their concerns

If they tick all or most of the above, the Product Manager is on the way to being emotionally intelligent.

Typical results from an outstanding product manager

If the Product Manager has a high EQ, they'll be the best at:

• Growing teams to become high-performing
• Negotiating with customers, users, partners, and people from different departments
• Resolving conflicts that might get in the way of cross-functional teams that make successful products
• Getting more funds, top talent, and other kinds of support or resources
• Prioritizing according to customer pain points
• Making sure the development team knows users actually need the changes they're implementing
• Obtaining the best trade-offs between the different individuals and teams involved and interested in a product's development

Ultimately, customers will trust the Product Manager to fix problems with the product. Plus, engineers will accept going the extra mile to incorporate a microfeature on short notice. And if the Product Manager is always calm and cool, management will trust their work.

At this point, you know how personality matters to the success of the product management role. Next, discover how the type of product and its users also affect their work.

The right measure of technicality

The more complex a technical product is, the more experience the Product Manager should have with building similar products.

On the other hand, for a less complex technical product, experience with launching products and supporting customers is enough.

Summing up, the Product Manager knows how to talk with the users of a product and the customer. Additionally, they have at least a basic technical understanding of the product.

But wait! That's not all. Product Managers also do some magic when interacting with engineers and top management.

Connecting with engineers and top management is key

The Product Manager should establish, maintain, and manage a relationship with the engineering team and top management.

Relating to the engineers

The relationship between the Product Manager and the engineering team depends on the company's view of the product development process. And it can be done in three different ways:

1. The Product Manager hands the product requirements to the engineering team, which transforms them into technical requirements.
2. Engineers develop the product, which the Product Manager validates and sometimes monetizes.
3. The Product Manager and the engineering team collaborate closely to develop the product.

❌ The first approach is not that agile or quick. In fact, it resembles a waterfall approach to product development that takes ages to get to a viable product. Also, engineers focus on coding and might lose focus on UX (user experience).

❌ The second alternative might innovate by creating new customer and user needs. Nevertheless, user feedback might come in too late to align the product with user needs without costing more.

✔️ Last, in the third option, the Product Manager and the engineering team gather requirements and make decisions together. The first doesn't tell the latter how to code, and the latter doesn't tell the first how to prioritize. The result is better UX, faster product development, and better product quality. And everyone's happy! 🎉

Relating to top management

The Product Manager should work closely not only with the engineering team but also with top management. The involvement of top management in the product development process is crucial to product success and the success of the product management role.

The more top management is involved in product development, the more the Product Manager is in a support role. And that's truer for young companies.

In a startup environment, the Product Manager often doesn’t lead the idea generation process. Another downside of young companies for those professionals is that they have less influence on the product vision.

It's time to consider how a company’s maturity impacts the product management role.

How company maturity influences the product manager

The company's maturity influences the Product Manager's performance and success. In a startup, this role should be more versatile. On the other hand, the role is narrower and has clearer boundaries in a mature company.

So, in a startup, the Product Manager might be responsible for market research, pricing, and customer support. That's because startups are growing companies that often have a tight staffing budget.

But despite being highly dynamic environments, young companies represent a land of opportunities for Product Managers. They might influence the business strategy more as the company grows. And they might also have a say when it comes to using or assigning company resources.

Finally, what the Product Manager lacks in a startup, they have in abundance in a mature company. An established customer portfolio is an example of that.

Product managers are the product’s backbone

The product management role is an essential element of any technology company. Perhaps their major responsibility is to define the product strategy and play a key role in Sprint Planning or PI Planning. But they also prioritize the planned features for the increment beforehand. And they coordinate the work of teams from different departments.

At a higher level, the Product Manager must communicate with those teams. The goal is to make sure everyone is on the same page. And ultimately, they're strong leaders who trigger the development of useful and profitable products.

If you're a Product Manager looking for more tools to help manage your product, check out Easy Agile's tools. Our roadmapping tool for Jira might help you sequence features for delivery to your customers. And Easy Agile's PI Planning solution for Jira might help you visualize program dependencies and milestones, plus do cross-team planning.

Anyone working in the agile environment would agree there are a million different terms to wrap your head around. As a marketer with no agile or software development experience, this is definitely true for me. Once you comprehend the definition, you are then tasked with understanding the role each play in the development life cycle and how they integrate with the associated agile methodology 🤯

In an attempt to alleviate any confusion, It's only fitting a couple of those key terms are deciphered … sprints and versions. What teams use them? What are they actually referring to? How do they contribute to the development life cycle?

Before diving into it, it’s important to consider context. Each teams environment will be unique and sprints and versions may be integrated differently. The goal of this blog post is to provide a wholesome understanding of both, in which you can take this information as the foundations for one to build upon, adjust to suit your teams environment and work at a sustainable pace.

Versions in a nutshell

In essence, a version is the culmination of your teams work that you will ship to the customer. It often includes a set of features and fixes that are released together as a single update to your product. Both scrum and kanban teams can work in versions.

Versions and releases are often used interchangeably, and look to a specific point in time or a milestone for your team to work towards. In Jira, working in versions assists the team with organising issues. We can consider a version as a container of issues that have all been stamped with a customer release number. The version or release is the result of what your team has been working on. It’s at this stage the latest version is ready to be shipped.

Sprints in a nutshell

At the core a sprint is a fixed block of time. During which development teams aim to implement and deliver improvements or a new feature for a product. More holistically, you might consider a sprint as a type of cadence for how your team works. Scrum teams work in sprints, whereas kanban teams do not. A sprint caters for fixed timeframes which work well in scrum, kanban calls for the team to adopt a more continuous flow of work hence sprints are not typically followed.

In Jira, the work you complete during a sprint comes from your backlog. Once you have filled your sprint with issues or stories to action, your team can now start working. At the end of the sprint the idea is to have a working component of the product. Working in sprints give your team the chance to organise your workload into smaller more manageable chunks of work. You may choose to move the issues you have worked on during a sprint to the version you will ship to the customer.

Contrast

It often helps to seperate sprints and versions by considering the motive. Sprints focus on the internal work to be completed and a version as the external outputs that the customer will receive.The main difference is to consider sprints as time-boxes and versions as a specific point in time.

Versions are more customer focused, where as sprints are more specific to the teams capacity. In Jira, when selecting the issues from your backlog a scrum team will prioritise issues into sprints and a kanban team will always take the top item and work towards the version.

Some teams may organise sprints around completing work for a specific version. For example, a scrum team might complete four sprints before the output reaches the version, where as a kanban team adopts a less structured way of working towards the latest release.

For the most part, the principle of both sprints and versions in Jira is to allow your team to filter your stories and issues in a way that prioritises the work to optimise delivery and improve efficiency. One of the many benefits of working in an agile team is the chance to acknowledge what’s working and how to improve it in the future. So whilst sprints or versions work for you now, it might not always be the case.

Make of that what you will, and consider how the framework of sprints and versions will work best in your environment to create your own teams methodology. As a way to filter your teams focus and prioritise your backlog into sprints or versions, consider Easy Agile’s User Story Maps for Jira.

Check out our blog to find out more!

The Ultimate Guide to User Story Mapping