Here’s why it’s so painful using Jira as a product manager
Product Managers: Jira Wasn’t Made for You
Let us start this post by stating that we’re not in any way critical of Jira. It’s a fantastic tool for task tracking and managing complex development projects. Heck, our dev teams here at craft.io use Jira to coordinate their work on building and maintaining our product management software platform. And the craft.io product management platform integrates deeply with Jira, which helps our clients more efficiently collaborate and sync their product and dev teams’ progress.
But Jira is not a strategic product management application. It’s a tactical app designed to monitor and coordinate the task-level details of a large initiative. Just as we wouldn’t blame a notepad and pencil for doing a poor job of managing your product content (because you shouldn’t be trying to use it for that), we don’t blame Jira for falling short as a product management tool either.
As a Product Manager, you need the right tool for your job. And if you’re looking for help finding that tool, check out our free Buyer’s Guide to Product Management Software.
Why Jira Falls Short for Managing Strategic Product Content
If you’re a Product Manager, you need a holistic view of all the moving pieces involved in bringing your product successfully to market and then continually improving it over time. Those moving pieces typically include:
- Your product strategy
- Your prioritization exercises to determine which items to work on next
- Your product roadmap
- Your capacity planning exercises
- Any dependencies across teams or items
- User and stakeholder feedback data
- Your OKRs or other success metrics
- A view of your entire product portfolio (including dependencies)
- The ability to connect each roadmap (or backlog) item to a business objective
You simply can’t manage and easily view all these high-level strategic elements using Jira – which is by design an execution-focused tool, not a platform built to help you see and share your big-picture strategy. And that’s the key reason using Jira is such a frustrating experience for product management professionals.
A Few Examples of How Jira Undermines Your Product Management Efforts
Let’s examine just a few of the many ways trying to cram your strategic work into a tactical tool like Jira will let you and your team down.
1. Inflexibility of views
In Jira, you’re forced into a single, tactical-level view – for sprint monitoring, reviewing issue backlogs, and bug tracking.
Each of these might be necessary for you to do your work in terms of development management, but they can only give you one piece of the picture.
2. Difficulty archiving and reviewing previous work.
Once a ticket is closed in Jira, it simply dies and vanishes, taking with it all the valuable contextual data you could be using to inform your strategy.
3. Inability to tie tasks to strategy.
Jira also can’t offer you a bird’s-eye view of how you’re doing with milestones. If you want to connect a completed task (say, the release of a new feature) to its effect on your KPIs, Jira alone can’t do that for you.
Complexity from Multiple Tools
So, what happens when Product Managers use a solution like Jira that doesn’t fully meet their requirements? Aside from wanting to pull out their hair, most people turn to various additional methods to fill in the gaps.
Typically, PMs use old-school spreadsheets for prioritization scoring. (Here’s why that’s a bad idea.) They use presentation software to painstakingly hand-craft roadmaps or other strategy slides to communicate their plans to stakeholders. (Ugh! Don’t do that, either.) And they enlist a handful of external task-management tools like Trello or Asana to bridge the gap between the dev team and the rest of the workforce.
When we asked hundreds of product professionals for our 2023 State of Product Management report, we found they place high value on having tools to complete their most important strategic projects. (And unfortunately, these projects often require different applications.)
If you take this route – trying to cram your strategic product work into Jira and other apps not designed for Product Managers – the time and energy you spend app hopping might not even be the biggest challenge that you face. That challenge could be cognitive overload.
Dealing with Cognitive Load
We all have a fixed amount of mental processing power as humans, and executing too many sophisticated activities, just like a machine, can significantly slow us down.
According to cognitive load theory, our output and learning capacity deteriorate when we are overburdened with complexity (intrinsic cognitive load), presentation (extraneous cognitive stress), or the processing, building, and automation of mental processes (germane cognitive load).
Juggling Jira’s interface, making sense of its Developer-oriented features, and trying to remember how closed issues affect your current plan all add up to a Product Manager’s cognitive load. The consequences don’t stop there: If you can’t see the broad picture and are always focused on the small stuff, your product ideation, planning, and optimization become muddled and impossible to execute.
Defaulting to Jira for your strategic product work will eventually degrade some of the fundamental attributes necessary to success as a Product Manager: nimbleness, the ability to iterate quickly, and the use of perspective to improve your plan. In other words, yet another reason you’ll want to use a purpose-built product management platform instead of Jira is that finding the right tool can improve the success of your product management career.
The Solution: Product Management Tools
So, what’s the answer? Use a tool designed to extend your view – to give you a central digital environment to view, share, update, and sync your strategy, roadmap, feedback, prioritization, capacity planning, and other key elements of your important product work.
The craft.io end-to-end product management platform enables you to build strategy, prioritize, communicate plans, gather and analyze stakeholder feedback, coordinate development, and cycle through iterations and optimization without having to dig through a backlog cemetery. Using a tool like craft.io means you can manage the individual moving parts while still having fast access to the big picture, reducing the cognitive burden and allowing you to focus on creating excellent products.
Book a best-practice session with a Product Executive
You Deserve a Tool Designed Just for You
Product managers require (and deserve) a comprehensive tool with a friendly user interface, robust connectors, and act as a system-of-record. Everyone involved in the product management process, including Product Owners, Developers, Designers, Senior Stakeholders, and Customer Success Teams, must have a single point of reference and be able to readily
access a single source of truth to guide their respective workstreams.
Trying to adapt Jira to check those boxes is impractical and challenging. Jira just doesn’t cut it when it comes to simplifying processes and decreasing the cognitive burden for PMs.
Bottom line: Get your team a software platform built just for Product Managers.
Try craft.io for free
