In the early days of personal computing, my generation used to spend a lot of time organizing our digital desktops.
Some undertook this endeavor to maintain a sense of order, while others were driven by the irresistible urge to satisfy their OCDs and appease their inner perfectionist.
Regardless of the motivation, the practice of tidying up our virtual workspace mirrored the innate human desire for structure and clarity in our surroundings.
But how does one navigate the intricate journey of product development?
Imagine telling the story of a user’s journey within a product—their actions, their interactions, and the steps they would take to achieve their goals.
It’s akin to crafting a narrative where each feature, each improvement, contributes to the larger tale of user satisfaction and engagement and how the development work would add up to solve the user’s pain points and achieve business goals.
Product development tools like Jira offer this ability through powerful organization of ticket and issue types.
From breaking down development work into tasks to categorizing bugs, Jira issue types provide a versatile framework to capture, prioritize, and track every aspect of a product’s lifecycle, seamlessly integrating into the narrative of product development.
While Jira excels in streamlining the development workflows, it benefits from integrations with end user-facing tools like Usersnap to feed the customer insights back into the development lifecycle.
Usersnap adds an additional layer of hierarchy where you can capture, analyze and triage user feedback, consolidate insights and then push back to the Jira product when it is development ready.
In this article, join us as we navigate this journey to unlock the full potential of organized chaos in product development through the collaboration of Jira and Usersnap.
Issue types within Jira establish a parent-child relationship, facilitating hierarchical organization and tracking of project components.
Epics serve as parents to features, which, in turn, encompass user stories, tasks, and bugs. This hierarchical arrangement streamlines project management and enhances visibility into the product development lifecycle.
In addition to standard issue types, Jira supports the creation of sub-tasks, further subdividing tasks into actionable sub-components. Sub-tasks enable finer granularity in task management, allowing teams to track progress at a more detailed level.
Every successful product begins with a vision—an overarching goal that guides its development.
However, to transform that vision into reality, it’s essential to break it down into manageable components.
Jira issue types provide a structured approach to accomplish this, allowing teams to organize and track their progress effectively.
While JIRA gives an option to create many different types of custom issue types as per your needs, here are some of the most commonly used in the industry:
Each issue type contains some unique information about the product, often templated in the form of ‘fields’ that serve as its building blocks and provide essential context and guidance.
The title and description fields, for instance, act as the narrative thread, providing clarity and insight into its purpose and requirements. Start and end dates, along with priority levels, serve as navigational aids, guiding teams through the project timeline and highlighting critical milestones along the way.
Furthermore method of project management, fields such as size, story points, and effort estimates offer a quantitative lens through which teams can gauge the complexity and scope of each endeavor. These metrics not only facilitate resource allocation and project planning but also foster a culture of accountability and transparency within the team.
Let’s examine how this process unfolds within the context of Uber which is on a mission to provide a cheaper alternative to owning a car or taking public transportation for its users.
Image taken from Atlassian Community
At the highest level of abstraction, Epics represent the major functionalities, capabilities or goals that align with the product vision. Epics often span multiple releases and serve as a high-level roadmap for development. In larger product companies and enterprises, epics might also have another parent in the form of an “Initiative” or “Capability”.
Real-world example:
Consider you are a PM at Uber, and you are working towards a goal to “Enhance the Rider Experience“. This goal could easily fit in as an Epic in Jira.
To achieve the goals outlined in epics, features are identified and prioritized based on feedback. These represent smaller, yet significant, components of the overall epic.
Real-world example:
As part of Uber’s goal to enhance the rider experience, some feature ideas could be “real-time driver tracking” or “preferred driver save list”. They can pick out and group the user feedback to help identify how important a certain feature is.
Features are further decomposed into user stories, which capture specific user requirements from an end-user perspective.
Each user story represents a discrete piece of functionality that can be developed, tested, and released independently. Stories are accompanied by acceptance criteria, defining the conditions under which a story can be considered complete.
Real-world example:
The “real-time driver tracking” feature for Uber can be further broken down into multiple user stories:
– As a rider, I want to see the estimated arrival time of my Uber driver so that I can plan my departure accordingly.
– As a rider, I want to see live location of the driver on the map so that I know where the driver is in the journey.
Image taken from stiltsoft.com
Tasks represent the most granular unit of work and are essential for tracking progress within a sprint cycle.
Within each story, various tasks may emerge and what needs to be done is assigned to the individual team members or developers based on their expertise.
Additionally, tasks may also include activities such as quality assurance (QA) testing, analytics, or other specialized tasks. Each team member is usually required to provide effort estimates on their task before they begin.
In some cases, if a task requires input from more than one team member, multiple sub-tasks service teams may be created as another layer of issue types hierarchy.
Real-world example:
Image taken from Atlassian Community
As the development progresses, the QA team plays a pivotal role in validating the functionality of each user story, rigorously testing for any deviations from expected behavior.
Any defects uncovered during testing are logged as Bugs under the corresponding user story (at the same hierarchy as Tasks), providing a comprehensive record of issues to be addressed. The Product Owner, in collaboration with the rest of the team, then assigns priorities (P1/P2/P3) to each of the bugs in Jira for the team to work on in order.
Any defects identified in the live environment post-release are often categorized as production incidents.
These issues require immediate attention and may include additional details such as the cause of the incident and its resolution to facilitate post-mortem analysis.
Real-world example:
Once all the tasks and bugs under a user story are completed, the user story can be marked as complete. In a perfectly agile world, all the user stories completed at the end of the sprint can be released to production.
This iterative development process continues across multiple sprints, with each sprint bringing us closer to the realization of the goal.
For quality assurance teams or users in the user testing programs to send in bug reports that can be easily transformed to Jira bug tickets, you can leverage Usersnap’s in-app feedback widget and auto-sync Jira integration. You can collect more real-world issues to help you complete the feature and match user expectations. Try this Jira ticket template.
Despite the meticulous planning and execution involved, products inevitably encounter scenarios that may not have been anticipated during the planning stages because, whatever can go wrong, will go wrong in the real-world.
Even if your product is as error-proof as a Taylor Swift performance, users would still encounter other friction points, usability issues, or would simply have suggestions for improvement that couldn’t have been predicted in advance.
While Jira excels in streamlining the development workflows from solution to release, it represents just one layer in the complex tapestry of the product development lifecycle.
Without a structured mechanism to capture and prioritize user feedback, teams risk missing out on valuable insights that could drive meaningful improvements and innovation. Moreover, the process of bug tracking and resolution can become cumbersome with bugs going unnoticed or unresolved, leading to user frustration and tarnishing the product experience.
Enter Usersnap, a tool that adds an additional layer of hierarchy on top of Jira, empowering teams to consolidate post-production insights directly inside Jira. By doing that, it enables teams to promptly respond to any feedback and build a high-impact roadmap for product enhancements.
While other traditional approaches often fall short by tackling the post-production challenges in isolation, Usersnap integrates seamlessly with Jira and many other product development tools like Azure DevOps, Trello, Basecamp, etc. to bridge the communication gap between the customers and the development teams.
Usersnap can capture all types of issues, feedback, and new feature requests and organize them inside your Jira project.
It allows you to customize the in-product feedback widget to capture any information you want, and then map each field to the corresponding fields in the individual Jira issues.
With a prioritized list of feedback landing in the product backlog, half of the job is already done. The customers get a say in prioritizing the roadmap items using community upvotes and the development teams ensure that they always work on the highest impact items and none of their efforts go to waste.
Moreover, by capturing visual feedback coming straight from the horse’s mouth as part of the Jira task details helps reduce feedback hand-off frictions. Visual cues provide clarity and context, facilitating more effective collaboration among team members and fostering a deeper understanding of user needs and preferences.
Not only that, Usersnap also automatically enriches every ticket with the metadata captured from the users’ session (device, os, browser, region, console logs etc.) to provide more context for the development teams. Ultimately, allowing teams to deliver higher-quality products that drive greater user satisfaction and engagement.
On the other hand, in order to close the feedback loop, the two-way status sync between Usersnap and Jira allows customers to stay updated at all times on the status of all their tickets as they travels different development stages inside Jira.
Beyond that, Usersnap propels product teams into a continuous loop of improvements. Through engaging microsurveys, product teams glean pinpoint feedback and gauge user sentiment at critical moments, offering invaluable insights into user experiences and preferences.
This iterative process not only fosters a deeper understanding of user needs but also empowers teams to make data-driven decisions and drive meaningful enhancements required to complete their products.
In order to unlock the missing piece in the product development life cycle and to learn more about the JIRA <> Usersnap integration, please refer to the detailed guides below:
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