Organising Product using Atlassian

TL;DR

Themes

Themes are a way to understand the high-level direction of our organization. Also, it helps to focus on what’s the ultimate goal we are working towards. Our key themes for 2021 are

• We’ll keep these as Labels in Jira tickets.

Initiatives

Initiatives are substantial and quantifiable deliverables for the quarter. The abstraction of initiatives should be enough for Leadership/Investors to have a glance at and understand what our goals for the quarter/month are.

• Initiatives can be technical/non-technical but should ALWAYS map to one of the Themes mentioned above

• We can have a standard format for an Initiative inspired by the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Oriented) Goal setting method

  • For example: [Adoption] Increase X% citizen adoption for property tax in UK by Z month

• Initiatives will reside in the Confluence Roadmap Document

Epics

Epics are breaking the Initiatives further down to achievable tasks that Engineering and Non-Engineering teams can work on.

• We’ll keep all the Epics in the eGov Product Team Jira Project so that we can easily pull up the roadmap using the epics from one project

• Anything taking more than 2 weeks to deliver would become an Epic

• All the epics together are meant to achieve the goal set in the initiative

For example, for the initiative [Adoption] Increase X% citizen adoption for property tax in UK by Z month, epics could look like these:

• [Adoption] Improve citizen-facing property tax UX

• [Accessibility] Improve accessibility for blind users

• [Adoption] Add property tax dashboard for ULB chief

• [Enablement] Educate partners about adoption metrics and tracking

So the Themes, Initiative, and Epics could look something like this:

Roadmap

Now we can pull up the Roadmap for individual modules easily using Jira Roadmap Feature. For instance