Use case #2 - product development
Swanly is built to manage all kinds of work in Jira; here we take a look at how we, at Jexo, make use of Swanly's cross-project product roadmap to build products!
Manage products in separate Jira projects
As challenging as it may be to create a cross-project issue roadmap in Jira itself, Swanly makes it really simple. At Jexo, we manage multiple products in Jira, each managed in a separate Jira project.
Swanly allows us to select the projects we want to work with, then plan stories for each of these projects in a single roadmap, with each project having its own swimlane.
Use templates to visualize stories
We use templates to visualize our stories and define their stages, based on what they are; whether they’re improvements to an existing app feature, or completely new features. Each template has its own stages; for example, Design, Development, Testing and UAT.
The stages are the same for both templates in this case, but they’ll differ in their duration. Improvements are usually completed in a shorter time period than say, new features.
Stories tagged as new features are highlighted in pink, while stories tagged as improvements are red. And, if we wish to view new features only, we simply use filters. You can even go further and filter stories currently in the making, or stories that haven’t yet begun.
Use monthly or weekly for high-level view
We use the monthly view to get a high-level overview of what is planned and when. Stakeholders and customer success teams especially like this view.
But for the development teams, we prefer a weekly view with all of the stages expanded. That way, we get to see exactly in what phase the stories we’re working on are, and what’s coming next.
Use the issue report to understand progress
To get a better understanding of story progress, we use the issue report view. Here, we can see at which stage the story is and how much of the work remains to be done. Here, you can see a list of all sub-tasks that need to be delivered for this story.
One of the ways we love tracking progress is by using the burndown chart which showcases the story’s progress over time, based on sub-tasks linked to the story.
Use customer feedback when developing
Most of the features and improvements we’ve come up with are based on customer feedback. We store all customer feedback as issues in a separate Jira project called ‘product feedback’ then we link them to relevant stories. The linked issues section is where you’ll find the links to customer feedback for an exact story in Swanly.
FYI: Our development team is quite thrilled with Swanly's dark mode feature; most of us are currently using it for the roadmap!
For more use cases, check out how Swanly can be used to manage marketing campaigns, or manage multiple projects at once.
Also, you can install Swanly here for free (yes free if you're 10 users or less) or try out the demo!