Case Study: Sync Product Roadmap and Jira Backlog with visor.us

Product roadmaps are important for keeping product managers, team members, and stakeholders in the same context about the product. It becomes a tool for transparency about product vision, direction, priorities, and development progress.

In our team we use Google Slides for product roadmap and Jira for development progress.

Challenge

Usually, it took us several steps and time to be able to inspect and adapt the product roadmap based on the jira backlog.

There are some challenges:

1. quite a lot of steps to create a jira backlog
2. jira backlog, product roadmap and sprint index are manually synced
3. The product manager has to wait for the sprint checkpoint to find out what information will be released

Approach

To streamline this process, we need to:

1. simplify the process of splitting the index sprint based on the squad
2. automate jira backlog generation
3. automate synchronization between jira backlog and product roadmap

To do that, we need an application that is capable of two-way integration with Jira. And we use visor.us.

With visor.us, the product roadmap and backlog flows like this:

1. draft product roadmap from google slide to visor.us
2. at visor.us, we assign backlogs to squads
3. we sync visor.us to jira, so we can auto-generate jira backlog
4. to get backlog progress, we sync visor.us again from jira
5. to get the timeline, we can add a “start date” and “due date” to the jira backlog
6. at the start of the sprint, we can recap the Sprint Index from visor.us
7. at the end of the sprint, we can recap the Release Note from visor.us

For more details, we can watch the following video:

Results

With a two-way integrated roadmap with Jira, the product roadmap flow becomes like this:

Change Note:

1. Sprint Checkpoint becomes only a tool for integration between squads, not part of the flow product roadmap.
2. Index Sprint All Squad & Release Note All Squad becomes only for recap or documentation.
3. Index Sprint Squad is deprecated.
4. No more need to manually create jira tickets for epic, story and task types.

Conclusion

• When a Product Roadmap is created on a different platform from the task backlog (jira backlog), it will take effort and time to maintain and keep it up to date.
• To overcome this, we need additional applications that can be two-way integrated with our backlog task (Jira), and visor.us is one of them.
• Don’t forget, there’s no one-size-fits-all.

I hope all of you are given health and well-being.