A Complete Guide to Mastering Jira for Aspiring & Practising Product Managers
Last updated — May 2nd, 2022
As an aspiring product manager, it can get overwhelming figuring out all you need to know regarding what it means to be a product manager and what you need to learn.
When I started out as a product manager after transitioning from software engineering some years ago, it felt like a lot was needed from me. I joined a software development agency and I was to manage the current projects as a product manager (30% product management, 70% project management 😂). Here are the things I personally battled with;
- Understanding how to be agile and getting my engineering team to also adopt agile practices in the organisation
- Deciding which agile framework to use and maximising the team’s efficiency
- Documentation (I wrote a lot of documents at my early stages😩)
- Managing workflows (no one told me that daily task monitoring, standups and fighting to get updates from engineers was going to be difficult😂)
- Prioritising bug fixes during active sprints
- Knowing when to say NO to my stakeholders and their constant feature requests
- Having enough time to research and get my mental health in check
It was a lot for a newbie and currently, I always advise any newbie I meet to have a formidable support network of product managers because your mental health will pass through the valley of the shadow of death😂. (check out the Product Manager Africa community or the People in Product community)
Anyways, I decided to help people like you get access to practical guides on navigating these issues through my volunteer work with Product Manager Africa. We are creating a series of product management workshops and I am facilitating the Jira workshop and navigating product management as a technical product manager.
On the 30th of April, 2022, we held a product management workshop where over 100 attendees actively participated in understanding agile and agile frameworks and believe me, it is insightful and heavily packed with things that only experience can get for you. We will also be carrying out a series of workshops on using Jira in the next few weeks and all relevant links can be found below.
- Practical workshop with Q&A on getting started with agile and agile framework + Slides from the session
- Practical workshop on getting started with Jira and setting your project up the right way
If you are interested in joining our product management community and getting access to these resources and more, signup here
My name is Derek Vinebo and I’ll be updating this article with links to our Jira workshops as we have them. So bookmark it, clap, share it with your friends and connect with me on LinkedIn too🤗
