Product Management

"Bottleneck" is a buzzword you don't want to hear. When it comes to your production process, maximizing your time and budget is all about keeping efficiency high. However, simply cutting the steps in your process may not make your customer any happier. If you want to achieve a high return on investment and increased customer satisfaction, value stream mapping is an ideal way to keep your team on track.

What is value stream mapping?

Value stream mapping (VSM) is a technique from the lean principles methodology that helps you visualize the steps you need to take to deliver a finished product or service. Value stream maps outline the flow of information and the physical materials to see where value is added for the customer. The purpose of VSM is to increase efficiency by reducing waste in the production process.

Widely known as the lean manufacturing method used in the Toyota Production System, VSM is now often used to eliminate bottlenecks in other industries like software development, supply chain, and healthcare. It's a versatile technique that can help many organizations shine. 🌟

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Why value stream mapping matters

When companies aim for efficiency, they often focus on reducing the total amount of production steps required. But customers don't always see what happens behind the scenes. Decreasing the length of your workflows mainly benefits your process without changing the experience for them. On the flip side, the value stream mapping process keeps your team members aware of customer needs, so your business can stand out.

For teams that use value stream mapping, reducing inefficiencies is all about cutting production process steps that don't add value. Value stream maps are a visualization of where you're wasting effort. They show your team that keeping steps within your process is okay — but each of those steps should help customers in some way. As a result, VSM prevents overproduction while ensuring your customers are happy with your final product or service.

You can achieve better lean agile workflows with value stream mapping and effectively keep up with customer demand. 💪

Value stream mapping terms

A typical value stream map is divided into three key sections — information flow, material flow, and lead time ladder — that help you see where process improvements can occur. To help you complete each part of a value stream map with greater ease, we'll explain a handful of common terms that you'll come across in each section.

As you learn these terms, you can refer to this Microsoft template to see a few VSM symbols that you'll often use.

Information flow

At the top of a standard value stream map is an information flow section that shows how data transmits between your team members, customers, and other stakeholders. Common terms you'll need to know to complete this section include:

• Customer: This is the consumer who will receive your final product. Your customer is represented in the upper right corner of your map.
• Supplier: This is your organization. Suppliers are placed in the upper left side of value stream maps.
• Dedicated process flow: This is a process or department (like "production control") that information flows through.

Material flow

In the middle of a value stream map is a material flow section that shows how you take your product or service to delivery, step by step. Each box represents a unique task, which may be performed by the same team or by another after a material handoff.

To complete the material flow section, you need to know these terms:

• Shipments: On value stream maps, "shipment" arrows point from the supplier to the first step in the material flow, or from the last step to the customer. They show how your information flow is related to the start and end of your production process. For example, an arrow can show how raw materials move between the supplier and factory or how software access is "sent" to a user.
• Cycle time (C/T): This metric represents the amount of time required between shipments.
• Inventory: Inventory is what's produced between each stage of the production process. Your inventory is usually written below a triangle with a "I" within it. 🔺

Lead time ladder

At the bottom of a value stream map is usually a time ladder that helps you visualize your lead time, which is the average time spent on each step of your material flow.

Kaizen burst

Throughout your value stream map, you can include Kaizen bursts. These represent bursts of activity (like a sprint) in which your team focuses on resolving a specific issue — such as processing customer returns — to quickly remove potential bottlenecks. The symbols for Kaizen bursts look like comic book explosions to grab your attention. 💥

How to create a value stream map

When you're ready to get started with value stream mapping, select the specific product or service that you want to create a map for. While all production processes can benefit from continuous improvement, you should ideally start with a product or service that could benefit the most from VSM. Once you've made your selection, follow these steps with your VSM team:

1. Define your objective: Identify what you want to change for the customer as a result of the value stream mapping process. For example, you might want to improve the quality of a product or the speed with which you deliver a service.
2. Clarify your scope: Define the start and end of your value stream map. You can create a map that includes all of the steps between concept and delivery, begin with an inefficient part of your value stream, or end with a contract agreement instead of a traditional delivery.
3. Outline your process: List each step of your production process. Begin by speaking with team members from each department involved in the process to gather any needed insights. Your list should include non-value producing steps. Collect data about cycle times, lead times, inventory, and more to understand each step even further.
4. Create and evaluate your current state map: Using the information you’ve gathered, create a map that reflects the current state of your process. Work with your team to identify which steps are productive and where improvements are needed. This map will allow you to pinpoint areas of waste, like long process times or software downtime.
5. Develop a future state value stream map: Create a second map that illustrates an improved process that eliminates non-valuable steps. This will be the map you'll ultimately follow to reach your objectives.
6. Build an implementation plan: To start moving toward your future state, establish how your team will implement the new process. Include what metrics you'll keep an eye on to ensure you're on track to reach your objectives. You can also establish how frequently you'll review your progress and adjust your future state map (if needed) during the implementation phase.

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Continue adding value for your customers

Learning to see from your customer's perspective is crucial to ensuring you stand out from your competitors. Following the value stream mapping process can help you visualize where your team is producing value and where you're doing extra work that can easily be eliminated.

To continue adding value for customers, learn how Easy Agile Programs can help you dive deeper into your product’s customer's journey.

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This past May John Walpole of Twitter presented Story Maps: A visual tool for customer focused development at the Facebook Technical Program Manager event in Silicon Valley. And our product, Easy Agile User Story Maps for JIRA, got a shoutout — thanks John!

Watch John’s lightning talk now:

John Walpole is a Technical Program Manager at Twitter in San Francisco. Prior to joining Twitter he was an engineer, product and program manager involved in the Xbox, Azure and Windows projects at Microsoft.

In this lightning talk, recorded at Facebook, John explores story maps as a way to figure out what your agile software development team should focus on (in order to satisfy customer needs). Story maps keep the customer journey front and centre during development and make it clear what should be included in a team’s sprint. For more on story mapping see Understand what your customers want with agile user story maps.

Keeping stakeholders in the loop is one of the key responsibilities of a product owner. A ton of work goes on behind the scenes before stakeholders can be presented with information about a product's deliverables and timeline. If sprints are your framework for getting work done and projecting delivery dates, the agile development team needs a way to make sure it's working through the product backlog at the right pace. The sprint burndown chart can show you the way.

In this post, we’ll talk about how to use a sprint burndown chart to monitor if your team is on track to complete its work and how putting user stories into sprints and epics generates even greater insights via user story maps.

What is a sprint burndown chart?

Image credit: Atlassian

First, a review: A sprint is a fixed period of time — typically between two and four weeks — that an agile software development team uses to complete a defined set of work.

A sprint burndown chart is a visual comparison of how much work has been completed during a sprint and the total amount of work remaining. It helps measure a Scrum team's progress, and it provides an easy view of whether the team needs to make any adjustments to complete its work for the current sprint iteration.

A burndown chart is a graph with a y-axis and x-axis 📉. The vertical axis measures the total amount of work that the team estimates it will complete during its current sprint. The horizontal axis shows the number of days remaining until the end of the sprint. On the chart are two lines: the actual work line (a line that represents the team's progress) and the ideal work line (a straight line from the top of the y-axis to the end of the x-axis).

You want your actual work line to follow your ideal work line as closely as possible. This would mean that work is being completed incrementally and at such a rate that it can be completed by the end of the sprint. Sprint goal achieved. 👍

A good practice for a team's product owner is to review the burndown chart on a daily basis. Doing so will allow you to detect if there are any progress issues happening in the sprint. For example, if your actual work line is trending above the ideal work line, then too much work remains to be completed by the end of the sprint at the current pace. We'll break down a few reasons why this may be happening later in the post. 😉

The sprint burndown chart is also a great tool to use during a sprint retrospective. Looking at this as a team can help generate talking points to discuss around the sprint retrospective's three key questions: What went well in the sprint? What didn't go as well as we hoped? How can we get better in the next sprint?

A primer on estimation methods

To measure effort on the vertical axis, we need to choose a metric.

Historically, traditional software teams used time to estimate the effort needed to complete a task or a project. For example, "I think it will take me three days to finish that user story." However, this approach can be risky because people tend to underestimate the amount of time it will take to finish a project.

The unit of measure on your sprint burndown chart's y-axis will depend on your estimation metric of choice. Let's review two common ones employed by agile sprint teams.

Ideal days

An ideal day is an estimate by a software developer of how many uninterrupted days it will take to complete a task. Assuming an ideal workday is eight hours of interruption-free work, the estimate could be stated as, "That user story will take me two ideal days." A benefit of this approach is that it accounts for work disruptions; however, it can be problematic because it often positions estimates as best-case scenarios.

Story points

Agile teams use story points as a relative estimate of effort as opposed to a time-based approach. Instead of saying, "I think this task will take me two days to finish," you would state, "I think this task is worth two story points." In this estimation technique, two story points are twice the effort than one story point.

Teams can use ideal days as a baseline to calibrate their story point estimates. For example, one ideal day can be equivalent to one story point, two ideal days to two story points, and so on.

A main benefit of using story points to estimate is that it allows teams to focus on relative measures of effort instead of thinking about how long it will take to finish a task.

Why your sprint burndown might be off track

A perfect actual burndown line is like Bigfoot — if it's been witnessed, it's probably a hoax. 😂

No team can perfectly estimate its work and develop at the exact pace represented by the ideal line. That said, if you notice large differences between your actual line and the ideal line (i.e., your actual line is much higher or lower than the ideal line), a number of things might be occurring:

• The team over- or under-committed to the amount of work at sprint planning
• Story points were added to or removed from the sprint after it started (scope creep)
• The estimated effort for some user stories is off

As a product owner, when you notice something that's off about your line after your daily review of your chart, you should mention that to your team members. The daily stand up is a perfect time to do so.

User stories and epics provide the big picture

User stories describe how a functional part of a product will work from a user's perspective. The common format of a user story reads, “As a [user role], I want to [user activity] so that I can [user goal].” For example, one might read, “As a new customer, I want to sign up for this product so that I can create my profile.”

User stories are placed in sprints to show what work (from the user's perspective) will be finished and by when. They can also be placed in epics to group them into themes within a product. Epics are widely used by agile teams to represent the high-level activity users will accomplish while using a product.

In our example above, an epic can capture all of the user stories that center around user signup, such as signing up, adding payment information, creating a user profile, and configuring notification settings.

If the sprint burndown indicates that the team is off track for a given sprint, then a combined view of sprints and epics can help you determine what impact that might have in the big picture. And, as we’ll see next, an interactive user story map can fix the problem.

User story maps: A view of epics and sprints

A sprint burndown chart is one of the handiest tools an agile software development team can use to make sure they're working and delivering at a solid pace. The burndown chart shows if any adjustments need to be made to your sprint.

User story maps provide another level of insights into team progress by:

• Showing sprints as vertical swimlanes
• Displaying epics as columns that represent the user journey through the product

This combination of swimlanes and columns unflattens your sprint backlog. It visualizes what the team will deliver and by when.

With Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira, you can supercharge your ability to make adjustments to your sprint. It can help you:

• Create new user stories
• Edit story points on a user story
• Assign items in the backlog to an epic and a sprint

With this tool, teams can view their sprint statistics at a glance and take action. They can ensure they don't overcommit and that they're on track to achieving their sprint goals. It’s the most comprehensive user story map solution in the Jira marketplace for taking action to adjust your sprints from a big-picture viewpoint.

Taking on new projects doesn't always help you achieve your business goals. When you want to grow in the direction of your goals without detours, you need to prioritize the projects that align with the path. Prioritizing begins with getting a holistic view of your business activities and objectives. Using project portfolio management (PPM), your team can focus on the big picture and align your goals with every move you make.

Keep reading as we explain what PPM is, its benefits and the five-step process you can take to implement it.

What is project portfolio management?

Project portfolio management is the process of managing a group of related projects together with the goal of improving overall business performance. Instead of focusing on projects one at a time, this centralized management process considers how prioritizing specific projects affects your ability to meet broader business objectives.

In a project management office (PMO), project portfolio managers are in charge of developing high-level strategies that help you make the most of all the resources you have. However, unlike individual project managers, project portfolio managers aren't involved with executing projects once they're selected.

Three benefits of project portfolio management

Much like stars in a constellation, individual projects and goals shine their brightest when you see how they're all connected. That's where the PPM process comes in handy. When you start practicing project portfolio management, you can experience these three benefits:

1. Improve your decision-making

PPM challenges your team to evaluate each project based on how well they align with your strategic goals. Instead of solely aiming to take on more projects — which can quickly lead to project overload — teams that use the PPM process focus on forecasting the benefits and risks of each opportunity. This way, you only commit to projects that suit your company's needs.

Whereas taking on too many irrelevant projects can lead to lots of work with little return, using the PPM process to make better decisions can help you choose high-impact projects that propel your team toward its goals. 🚀

2. Reduce your project failure rate

A lack of centralized planning can leave a lot of room for project failure. Your resources might be spread too thinly, or inefficient workflows may riddle your projects. When your organization includes project portfolio managers who look at the big picture in addition to individual project teams that focus on the details, you can better spot potential agile planning mistakes before they occur. Risks like overspending and poor scheduling are less likely to be an issue if you're considering the broader organizational strategies, budgets, and timelines that tie all of your projects together.

For your stakeholders, a lower project failure rate means more value is delivered over time. A software company, for instance, can reduce the gaps between new product or feature launches by ensuring they’re only working on projects they’ll complete.

3. Increase your team productivity

PPM allows you to see a broad overview of what your team members are working on across projects. As a result, you can better designate tasks based on which team members are best fit for each role and allocate resources based on your priorities. This optimization can help you improve your return on investment (ROI). Plus, optimizing helps avoid team member burn out by eliminating excess work.

The 5-step project portfolio management process

With project portfolio management tools projected to be a $3.2 billion market in 2021, it's clear that many agile teams are implementing PPM in their organizations. Regardless of what PPM tool you use, these five steps are key to successful centralized management.

1. Identify your business strategy

The first step in effective project portfolio management is identifying your company's strategic objectives. When you clarify what your organization wants to achieve — including key performance indicators (KPIs), which are metrics that measure success, and objectives and key results (OKRs) — your team can work toward a shared vision.

Afterwards, establish a project prioritization process. Decide what steps you’ll take to determine how well a project aligns with your goals. For example, some businesses may use a scoring model, giving projects numerical scores in key categories until they find the highest averages. Others may simply weigh the costs and benefits of each project with overall business objectives in mind.

2. Make lists of your current and potential projects

To start optimizing your project portfolio, take inventory of your current projects, as well as projects you've been considering. Take note of your project statuses, categories, and other details that can help you gauge each project's relevance to your business goals. You can also estimate the resources you need to execute each project. This estimation can further help you measure costs and feasibility, so you can effectively perform resource management.

​3. Evaluate your project portfolio

Once you finish compiling your list, you can begin using your project prioritization methodology to evaluate projects. As you determine if each project is beneficial for your business, don't forget to consider feasibility. If a project isn't feasible, then it's a no-go for your team. By the end of your evaluation, you should have a list of projects that align with your goals and provide the most value to your business.

Ideally, your portfolio should include a mix of projects that help fulfill short-term and long-term objectives. This way, you can secure the returns you need to maintain your current growth rate while leaving room for innovation that leads to exponential growth in the future.

4. Allocate available resources

As soon as you narrow down the number of projects you want to take, start with resource allocation. Divide your budget, team members, and other resources between each of your priority projects. You'll also need to create a timeline for your project portfolio that includes each project's deadline. You can include key milestones to make your timelines more detailed, too.

Risk management is another crucial aspect of this step. If you notice that you don't have enough resources to complete all the projects you’ve selected, reassess your priority projects until you build a portfolio that doesn't stretch your team too thinly. (And if you can't afford to give everyone a car like Oprah, don't. 🚗)

5. Adjust your portfolio and resources as you go

A critical component of project portfolio management is tracking your projects throughout their life cycles. Keep a close eye on your project performance, including your ROI, project failure rate, and other KPIs as you begin executing the projects you chose. If your project portfolio doesn't perform as desired, you can adjust your resource allocation in real-time, instead of addressing issues when it's too late.

Tracking key metrics can also help you improve your PPM process as you go. For example, if your project prioritization methods aren't helping you reach your financial goals, brainstorm more effective ways to evaluate each of your projects.

Zoom in on the details with Easy Agile Programs

Project portfolio management is a useful process that can help your agile team make decisions with a bigger picture in mind. Instead of hyper-focusing on individual projects, the PPM process enables you to remove roadblocks from your broader workflows and maximize resources across an entire portfolio. This way, you can keep driving a straight path toward your business goals.

Of course, the big picture isn't everything. To be a well-rounded agile team, you need to zoom in on the details every so often, too. With Easy Agile Programs, you can get more context on your projects, so you can continue maximizing your organizational growth.

The perfect product launch is an elusive beast. As the launch date nears, the pressure mounts while the product manager deals with last-minute changes, bugs infesting the Jira board, and some network or server issue that threatens to ruin everything. You might have the perfect product management framework, yet the journey to the finish line is usually anything but elegant.

Whether you're launching a new product or releasing a new feature, product managers thrive on the excitement, exhilaration — and exhaustion! -— that come with the job, particularly surrounding significant releases. Even with careful planning, an exquisite product roadmap, and a neatly refined backlog, the final moments before launch always seem to end in a fight to the finish.

Before you place all the blame on your product management framework, or worse, your product team (Nah, you would never do that!), take a step back and breathe. We’ll walk through some ideas on how you can relieve some of the chaos on launch day. (Let's be honest, no drama on launch day would be just a little disappointing.)

Pre-launch planning

If you're using an agile product development methodology like Scrum or Kanban, you're already ahead of the game in terms of planning. Experienced PMs will have a roadmap with t-shirt sized epics and stories carefully laid out using established prioritization methods.

Based on your product strategy, you may choose to release new product features to production after each iteration. But sometimes, the product marketing plan requires a bigger splash. In this case, you can take advantage of press releases, major advertising events, or other high-visibility marketing opportunities.

Planning how you intend to release the product is as important as deciding what will be part of the release. Product development teams need to coordinate with product marketing to consider the following:

• Will you do a soft launch to a limited audience?
• Do you need to pre-release specific components to test pricing, marketing copy, or usability?
• Will you leave pre-releases in the wild until launch, or will you test for a specific time period and then pull them back?
• Do you have a hard date on which you must release (ex., Super Bowl Sunday), or is there some flexibility in the timing?

Answers to these questions drive the release strategy, which is then factored into your release plan and execution.

When it comes to determining what features to include in your product launch, you can choose from a variety of product management frameworks or use a hybrid approach and mix and match the methodologies to fit your situation.

The Kano model, AARRR (acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue) theory, and OKRs (objectives and key results) all provide product management frameworks. These help product owners plan feature releases that align with the product vision and realize profitability objectives.

Remember: It's always a good idea to have a Plan B or even a Plan C to allow for unexpected events or issues that tend to rear their heads just before a launch. Atlassian has a great product launch template to get you started if you're working on your first release.

Launch day planning

A launch day checklist is your best friend on launch day. You might even want or need more than one list. A product launch has too many moving parts across too many teams for you to rely on memory alone. Your marketing, IT, and product teams will all play a role in the launch, performing necessary activities for their roles.

Particularly if this might be the first product launch in your startup, checklists help product teams think through details with clear heads well before launch day. The best plan is to ask each team to create their checklist and then meet as a group to align and coordinate each task's timing. Some launch day tasks are independent, ready to be tackled at any time. In contrast, others will be more time-sensitive or dependent on something else happening.

For teams with a few launches under your belt, these checklists hold the lessons learned from prior releases and, when updated after each launch, turn your team into a smooth-as-silk, product-launching machine.

Post-launch planning

As you know, a product launch is not the end game. Once the dust settles and everyone has gotten some sleep, you need to measure how the product performs. Planning how to measure the product’s initial key metrics allows product managers to communicate results to stakeholders early and as often as necessary.

Measuring key product metrics after a launch validates your decision-making of the product features, confirms you built the right product for the market, and helps you ask and answer the right questions when planning more feature builds and marketing strategies.

Important key product indicators following the launch can include total sales, top attribution channels, activation stats, and affinity sales. If you're launching a new feature within an existing product, you'll also want to keep an eye on retention numbers. A spike in churn rates could indicate a problem with the user experience or the underlying technology solution.

Beyond measuring the results of your release, you'll also need to prepare what's next. After your development team gets some shut-eye, they'll come back to work looking for their next assignment. You'll need to have your backlog ready for the next sprint planning ceremony, and then, it's back to business as usual. There may also be some immediate customer feedback that needs to be actioned.

Once you get your team off and running toward the next release, it’s time to take a look at your roadmap. You’ll likely discover new information when customers start using your new product or feature. It’s a good idea to leave some room in the roadmap to take on work discovered during the first few weeks of your launch.

Then there’s one last thing — CELEBRATE!! You and your team worked hard and accomplished something really cool! It’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind toward the next release. Take some time to pat yourselves on the back for a job well done.

Use your product management framework to tackle launch day like a rock star

With some planning and flexibility, you can set up your product team to make launch day look like a walk in the park. And the sooner you get good at this, the better. You'll always be launching something throughout the product lifecycle, from the initial MVP to new features to the end-of-life process.

Thorough roadmapping gets you off to a solid start, and as you get closer to launch day, you'll build out more of the critical details to ensure you don't miss anything. Cross-team coordination is essential, and checklists help open communication channels and get the entire team on the same page.

Early reporting on results builds confidence with stakeholders and is also a great way to show your team the results of their efforts.

Enjoy the adrenaline rush of launch day, but try to eliminate a little of the chaos and stress. As soon as you've launched, it's time to move on to the next thing. That's the nature of product development, and that's why we love it.

There's a lot in common between a Product Manager and the executive president of a professional sports club. Don't buy it? Well, you should 😋, and here's why.

• Both are experts in their businesses.
• They both know what it takes to win. 🏆
• They're great leaders of their teams.

Stay tuned because this article will give you a grasp of how unique the product management role is. You'll learn what their responsibilities are and more.

And if you landed a job opportunity as Product Manager, we'll give you a hand with mastering your craft. 🥇

But first things first: defining the role. And once you know this, we’ll move on to exploring their tasks, unique characteristics, and the challenges they face.

What's a product manager?

For context, let's start with product management’s role in PI (Product Increment) Planning.

According to our Guide to PI Planning, the Product Manager must understand the customer needs and validate solutions against those needs. That’s the starting point and foundation for their role. But that's still generic. 🤔

The Product Manager is THE product expert. That makes them the best-equipped team member to make strategic decisions about the product. These decisions affect the work of a lot of people in a company.

The Product Manager is a product visionary and strategist. They monitor and analyze the market competition. That's how they define a unique product vision and product strategy. Their ultimate goal is to add unique value to the market based on customer needs.

The Product Manager decides what products or product features to build and in what order. This means they prioritize new products or new features in an existing product. Defining a product vision and a product strategy is intimately related to prioritization. They must do their best effort to maximize both customer value and business value. Not an easy challenge!

The Product Manager leads the teams responsible for developing a new product or improving an existing one. They usually work across cross-functional teams, so leading them demands a great deal of organization from the Product Manager. Plus, they need the ability to bridge, communicate with, and supervise engineering, marketing, sales, and customer support staff.

The Product Manager participates in all stages of product development, from planning and conception to launch or release. But what tasks do they do?

The product manager's tasks

You already know some of the product management tasks. But here's a comprehensive list of product management tasks:

• Understand, identify, and, if necessary, represent customer pain points and business challenges.
• Manage the process of generating new ideas for products or features, and decide which ideas to move forward with.
• Describe a product vision, and align all teams with that vision, especially in large companies.
• Create and maintain the product roadmap.
• Design a strategy for product development.
• Limit the project scope.
• Rank features against the product strategy, business goals, customer value, and customer or user feedback.
• Specify the requirements for each feature.
• Define the launch or release process, which comprises phases and milestones.
• Manage dependencies within and between phases.
• Identify the deliverables and corresponding due dates for the cross-functional teams.
• Coordinate the activities of each team from product development until launching the product into the market.
• Validate product design and implementation.
• Ensure the successful launch or release of the product.

Now, are you working with Scrum? If so, you might be wondering about the differences between the Product Manager and the Product Owner.

Product managers vs. product owners

Although they may interchange tasks, they're distinct roles. In short, the latter works towards realizing the product vision and the product strategy that the first defines.

The Product Owner works more closely with the software development team. On the other hand, the Product Manager interfaces directly with customers, users, and partners.

Sometimes, when there's no Product Manager, the Product Owner steps into this role. However, in that case, there's little time to coordinate the work of all teams around the same product vision.

But regardless of whether there’s an existing Product Owner, there are key ingredients that make good and great Product Managers. Let's discuss that next.

What makes a great product manager?

The characteristics of a great Product Manager consist of technical skills and personality traits. So, besides technical skills, they should have a high EQ (emotional coefficient). This means:

• Showing customers and users empathy during any communication with them
• Developing trustworthy relationships with internal teams and external stakeholders
• Inspiring and motivating team members
• Discretely persuading people to take the necessary steps to achieve a common goal, which starts with listening to them
• Avoiding bias in the preference for solutions by being user-centric and ensuring that solutions answer user needs
• Managing stress and performing well under pressure
• Demonstrating the urgency of task completion without causing panic
• Knowing how to ask the best questions to the right people at the right time
• Delegating the power of decision-making by giving teams a methodology and criteria for escalating if needed
• Daring to confidently make strong statements about priorities, advocating for any of their decisions
• Having the courage to choose whom to favor with a decision, whether it’s engineering, marketing, or sales
• Not being afraid of changes such as defining a new product strategy for business growth
• Reading the emotions of customers, users, and internal team members, and capturing their concerns

If they tick all or most of the above, the Product Manager is on the way to being emotionally intelligent.

Typical results from an outstanding product manager

If the Product Manager has a high EQ, they'll be the best at:

• Growing teams to become high-performing
• Negotiating with customers, users, partners, and people from different departments
• Resolving conflicts that might get in the way of cross-functional teams that make successful products
• Getting more funds, top talent, and other kinds of support or resources
• Prioritizing according to customer pain points
• Making sure the development team knows users actually need the changes they're implementing
• Obtaining the best trade-offs between the different individuals and teams involved and interested in a product's development

Ultimately, customers will trust the Product Manager to fix problems with the product. Plus, engineers will accept going the extra mile to incorporate a microfeature on short notice. And if the Product Manager is always calm and cool, management will trust their work.

At this point, you know how personality matters to the success of the product management role. Next, discover how the type of product and its users also affect their work.

The right measure of technicality

The more complex a technical product is, the more experience the Product Manager should have with building similar products.

On the other hand, for a less complex technical product, experience with launching products and supporting customers is enough.

Summing up, the Product Manager knows how to talk with the users of a product and the customer. Additionally, they have at least a basic technical understanding of the product.

But wait! That's not all. Product Managers also do some magic when interacting with engineers and top management.

Connecting with engineers and top management is key

The Product Manager should establish, maintain, and manage a relationship with the engineering team and top management.

Relating to the engineers

The relationship between the Product Manager and the engineering team depends on the company's view of the product development process. And it can be done in three different ways:

1. The Product Manager hands the product requirements to the engineering team, which transforms them into technical requirements.
2. Engineers develop the product, which the Product Manager validates and sometimes monetizes.
3. The Product Manager and the engineering team collaborate closely to develop the product.

❌ The first approach is not that agile or quick. In fact, it resembles a waterfall approach to product development that takes ages to get to a viable product. Also, engineers focus on coding and might lose focus on UX (user experience).

❌ The second alternative might innovate by creating new customer and user needs. Nevertheless, user feedback might come in too late to align the product with user needs without costing more.

✔️ Last, in the third option, the Product Manager and the engineering team gather requirements and make decisions together. The first doesn't tell the latter how to code, and the latter doesn't tell the first how to prioritize. The result is better UX, faster product development, and better product quality. And everyone's happy! 🎉

Relating to top management

The Product Manager should work closely not only with the engineering team but also with top management. The involvement of top management in the product development process is crucial to product success and the success of the product management role.

The more top management is involved in product development, the more the Product Manager is in a support role. And that's truer for young companies.

In a startup environment, the Product Manager often doesn’t lead the idea generation process. Another downside of young companies for those professionals is that they have less influence on the product vision.

It's time to consider how a company’s maturity impacts the product management role.

How company maturity influences the product manager

The company's maturity influences the Product Manager's performance and success. In a startup, this role should be more versatile. On the other hand, the role is narrower and has clearer boundaries in a mature company.

So, in a startup, the Product Manager might be responsible for market research, pricing, and customer support. That's because startups are growing companies that often have a tight staffing budget.

But despite being highly dynamic environments, young companies represent a land of opportunities for Product Managers. They might influence the business strategy more as the company grows. And they might also have a say when it comes to using or assigning company resources.

Finally, what the Product Manager lacks in a startup, they have in abundance in a mature company. An established customer portfolio is an example of that.

Product managers are the product’s backbone

The product management role is an essential element of any technology company. Perhaps their major responsibility is to define the product strategy and play a key role in Sprint Planning or PI Planning. But they also prioritize the planned features for the increment beforehand. And they coordinate the work of teams from different departments.

At a higher level, the Product Manager must communicate with those teams. The goal is to make sure everyone is on the same page. And ultimately, they're strong leaders who trigger the development of useful and profitable products.

If you're a Product Manager looking for more tools to help manage your product, check out Easy Agile's tools. Our roadmapping tool for Jira might help you sequence features for delivery to your customers. And Easy Agile's PI Planning solution for Jira might help you visualize program dependencies and milestones, plus do cross-team planning.

You can find dozens of product management tools that fit SaaS goals.

These tools vary in features, functionality, and pricing. However, one thing is certain: Product management tools are more supportive than ever before.

Find out what product management can best support your software development.

What are product management software tools?

Product management software tools help to guide software development teams through their workflow.

Product management tools can help team members conduct research, create assessments, do iterations, and plan their product launches. Some tools even support roadmapping product development, so they can support agile teams.

Development teams can use roadmapping tools to:

• Streamline product strategy
• Draw up their product plan
• Create their product roadmaps
• Develop user journey maps
• Manage backlogs
• Conduct research on customer needs
• Improve prioritization of product features
• Determine the length of their Scrum sprints
• Analyze data for their product research
• Do process mapping
• Manage product releases
• Improve how agile teams collaborate
• Create new products
• Deliver better products
• Message team members

Using product management tools are ideal when working with remote teams. It is also the solution to increasing collaboration across cross-functional teams.

Many or most of these product management tools also integrate well with existing software, so it’s no big deal to customize existing systems. You can also customize many of these product management tools to meet your product team’s needs.

Here are eight of the most recognizable product software tools available to start your new roadmapping journey.

1. Jira

Jira is typically seen as the best product management software tool for software development. However, many other industries use Jira for roadmapping and managing their projects. This popularity is due to the fact that Jira offers a free plan, but it goes deeper than that.

Jira is the ideal software management tool to use in managing Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, and other agile methodologies. The user interface is intuitive, making it easy and convenient to use whether you’re a product manager for software or other products. Because it is also a convenient tool, you can use it to assign tasks and manage projects and product development.

Product managers can easily keep track of workflows, agile team responsibilities, and tasks. You get to see where backlogs are building in Scrum or Kanban. You can also manage velocity charts, burndown charts, release burndown and sprint reports with Jira software.

You can also include software like Slack, GitHub, and others to round off your Jira product management tool.

Some of the key features you can anticipate in this software include:

• Visually capturing the product vision to develop better products
• Collaboration tools to keep teams on board in real-time
• Gantt charts to view project and product progress
• A Scrum or Kanban board
• User-friendly roadmaps
• Milestone tracking
• Portfolio management
• Comprehensive Agle reporting
• Extensive automation of the product management process
• The ability to connect codes with issues

In terms of pricing, small businesses often go for the free plan. Jira’s free plan allows 10 users to access roadmapping and other features simultaneously. The paid plan is about $7 monthly for each user.

Agile teams using Jira can benefit from Easy Agile Programs for Jira. It helps teams align on their goals, focus on features and epics, and view dependencies. However, all Easy Agile plugins work with Jira. They simplify everything from PI planning to creating personas and roadmaps.

2. Trello

Trello uses a card system to manage Kanban and other product development workflows. When the administrator sets up the Trello board, product teams get a visual representation of workflows. They can see user stories, who is responsible for tasks, and an overall view of workflow and product life cycles. All these features and others make for an excellent roadmap tool.

The disadvantage of this system is that it doesn’t have a calendar. Another drawback is it offers basic folders for task categorization. It will be difficult to use Trello for Scrum, for example, as you have limited access to folders and there are no subfolders. You can however access multiple user stories to streamline workflows for simple projects.

Despite these drawbacks, Trello does include workflow automation, courtesy of the Butler robot. This little robot feature enables you to set certain rules and calendar triggers so that you can automate repeating assignments. Trello is probably better suited to startups or tracking progress when you have a small salesforce.

Because the Trello platform is simple (but intuitive), team collaboration is convenient. Communicating via Trello is also user-friendly, helping product teams to immediately see who is doing what and task deadlines.

While Trello defaults to the Kanban methodology, you can use it for other project types.

Several features you can look forward to on Trello, include:

• Prioritization of tasks
• Tracking deadlines
• Gantt charts
• Kanban board
• Tools for Agile team collaboration
• Resource and task management
• Automation of workflows
• Tracking team member progress
• Various templates

Trello has a free plan where product managers can use up to 10 boards for each of their teams. You can also purchase the pain plan on a yearly basis, which costs around $10 per user.

3. Wrike

Wrike is as much a tool for streamlining workflows as it is for managing product development. Wrike is flexible, adaptable, and dynamic and is a tool designed for better product decisions.

You can use it for small product management, single client management, or as an enterprise-wide tool for product management. Wrike is also versatile enough to use in software product development or marketing. This platform also has a special tool for marketing, making it easier to manage salesforce operations.

Wrike is customizable, so you can include Gantt charts and Kanban boards to improve team member collaboration. Another function of this platform is its Work Intelligence AI tool which product managers can use for automation and predict product risk.

Wrike works well with Jira, Slack, GitHub, Dropbox, and several other tools. You can also customize other integrations to tailor Wrike for product management teams. If you want to add software which this platform doesn’t support, you can. You simply create the solution you need.

The most prominent features of Wrike are:

• The ability to integrate third-party applications
• Its comprehensive, versatile API
• Managing multiple template options
• Permission and access control
• Importing and exporting data
• Integration of spreadsheets and tables
• Convenient task management
• A user interface for dragging and dropping
• Categorizing and structuring product tasks
• Calendar and timeline control
• Files and documents management
• Tracking activities and progress
• Filtering of data
• Stats and reporting
• Shared or public workspace

Wrike offers a free plan for the use of simple features, but you need to pay about $9.80 a month for each user to access more complex functionality.

4. Productboard

Productboard is right up there with the likes of Zendesk. It provides one of the best features for gathering user feedback. As every software development team knows, user feedback can make or break product success. With this product, you can categorize customer feedback, turn this into valuable information and prioritize this feedback.

Productboard lets you track their feedback during the lifecycle of each product via a portal. This portal supports idea exchange and management, which team members use as inputs to increase product value. This software tool is also great for collecting use cases and understanding user behavior to create the right products for customers.

You can use Slack and email with the Productboard, but if you want additional software integration, you must arrange this yourself. Fortunately, the API in this product is user-friendly to make this happen.

The main features of Productboard include:

• Storehouses for product feedback
• Customer segments that are particularly dynamic
• The ability to prioritize and categorize customer feedback
• Transforming feedback into valuable insights
• A powerful system for value assessment
• Roadmapping tools that you can customize
• Prioritization of tasks

You can get an annual Productboard basic plan at around $20 a month for every user.

5. ProdPad

ProdPad takes the user experience into consideration. It has a lean roadmapping function that you can use to highlight goals and objectives. You can experiment with this product software tool to include user feedback in product development. ProdPad is also known as being among the best product management software tools on the market.

The product roadmap tools are simple to use and include color coding for roadmapping. ProdPad has an easy drag-and-drop feature, privacy settings, and you can use the priority checkpoints as you need.

Development teams can access an ideas management feature to create priority charts. Here, they can see how backlogs influence impact and effort charts in workflows. You can also simply import data from other sources to boost new product development if necessary.

One more feature that characterizes ProdPad is the ability of team members to see associations between user ideas and product development. They can also develop customer lists to question further about their product experiences.

You can collect use cases and understand user behavior better. You can then use all this information as inputs for new product development.

Features that you can expect from this product management tool are:

• Idea generation and capture
• Capture and storage of customer feedback
• Integration with apps that support customer feedback
• Integration with other third-party apps
• Priority charting of ideas
• Lean product roadmaps
• Product roadmapping based on objectives
• Creation of customer portfolios

You can purchase ProdPad’s Essential Plan at about $149 per month for annual billing. This plan allows you to use three administrators or editors for product planning.

6. Asana

Asana is also a useful management platform. You can use it as a solution to roadmap workflows. Asana is popular among small business startups and larger enterprises.

This management solution is cloud-based. It enables team members to share their workspace and assign and track tasks and work progress. Asana is also an excellent platform for team members to collaborate.

You don’t get much customer support with Asana. And, although not ideal for complex team management, Asana has many redeeming features, some of which include:

• Excellent team messaging and collaboration
• Ideal for outlining detailed goals
• Efficient for managing multiple tasks and team members
• A user-friendly dashboard
• Tracking of milestones
• Automation
• Several templates option
• Project planning functionality
• Multiple analytics and reporting options
• Managing resources
• Tracking of time and expenses

Asana has a free plan if you can cope with limited features. Paid plans begin at approximately $10.99 per month for each user. The company bills annually.

7. GLIDR

There are multiple management solutions for streamlining product workflows. GLIDR offers one more platform from which to achieve product software development goals. You can develop detailed product plans that meet customer expectations. GLIDR highlights the customer experience, so places their feedback at the forefront of the best product deliverables.

You can manage product research, use cases, and user behavior on this platform. You can then create product specs, link ideas, create viable user stories, prioritize features, and much more.

GLIDR provides several board view options that help software developers to create themes from ideas. You can also categorize ideas by their status, fill in timelines, or show these ideas on Kanban boards.

Other helpful functions include the ability to integrate apps such as Intercom and Zendesk with GLIDR. You can also link Jira and Trello with this product management software.

Product managers and teams can use GLIDR to streamline their workflows, track product progress, create reports and transform roadmaps into the best products possible.

The primary features of GLIDR include:

• Product canvasses
• Public roadmapping
• Options for research and experimentation
• Trend scores to rank ideas
• Prioritization of features
• Activity feeds
• Progress tracking and monitoring
• User-friendly dashboards
• Reporting that you can export via PDF format

You can test GLIDR for free for 14 days. Then, the cheapest option is about $8 per person, per month for a team of five people. GLIDR bills annually and has three other plan options that give you access to more features.

Up your game with Easy Agile

One way to up your product management software game is to take advantage of Easy Agile resources. You can either use our Jira apps to integrate with existing product management platforms or give your existing system a boost.

Select from apps for Kanban Workflow for Jira or boost product development performance with User Story Maps for Jira.

Up your game with Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira to guide your team to product success or use our Programs for Jira for Program Increment Planning.

Whichever apps you choose (all of them?), you can improve product team management with the best product management software available.

The lean methodology is all about eliminating waste and improving efficiency to maximize and deliver consistent customer value. Under lean, if a process doesn’t bring value to the customer, it’s considered wasteful and is eliminated or reduced as much as possible. It’s a development method and guiding mindset that helps teams refine their processes in the name of efficiency, effectiveness, and continuous improvement.

Here, you’ll learn about the origins of lean as well as 7 key benefits of adopting the lean methodology.

An intro to lean methodology

The lean methodology grew out of lean manufacturing. The concept was introduced in manufacturing to improve profits by reducing costs as opposed to relying solely on increased sales. If a company can eliminate waste and become more efficient, it can save money, which increases overall profits.

While the roots of lean manufacturing can be traced back to the 1400s, Henry Ford first fully integrated the entire production process, creating something called flow production in the form of an assembly line.

This was a revolutionary change in car manufacturing, but while Ford certainly enhanced flow, he didn’t leave much room for variety. In the 1930s and ‘40s, Japanese manufacturers Kiichiro Toyoda, Taiichi Ohno, and others at Toyota made a series of simple innovations that allowed them to provide both continuity in process flow and a wide variety of vehicles, creating the Toyota Production System.

This form of lean production enabled the elimination of waste, reduced costs, increased efficiency, and made information management simpler and more accurate. Lean methodology was further distilled and explored in the books The Machine That Changed the World by James P. Womack, Daniel Roos, and Daniel T. Jones, and Lean Thinking by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones.

The latter book also introduced the five key principles of lean:

1. Identify Value
2. Map the Value Stream
3. Create Flow
4. Establish a Pull System
5. Seek Perfection

Learn more in our article, Understanding Lean Agile and the 5 Lean Principles.

Of course, lean thinking has evolved beyond manufacturing and has been adapted and applied to everything from healthcare to construction to logistics and distribution to government to software development.

1. Increased efficiency ⏳

The application of lean to business processes is all about reducing waste to increase efficiency. But how do you figure out which processes provide value?

Once customer value is identified, teams can create a value stream map. Value stream mapping tracks each of the steps and processes to bring a product from inception to delivery. Organizing your processes visually where everyone can see them allows teams to clearly see what does and doesn’t provide value. If any steps or processes don’t bring value to the customer or are found to be otherwise wasteful, they are eliminated or reduced as much as possible.

A team can’t be efficient if they’re wasting time on tired processes that don’t provide customer value. Adopting lean methods helps to get rid of those processes, so you can dedicate your team’s energy exclusively to the processes that do, thereby increasing your team’s value flow, efficiency, and productivity.

2. Reduced bottlenecks 🛑

A bottleneck or broken process, no matter how small, can totally derail a workflow or make it impossible to meet a deadline.

With lean, tasks aren’t blindly or randomly assigned. Teams work together to ensure work is evenly distributed and deadlines are met. They discuss any potential bottlenecks in advance so they can be solved before they become a financial burden or delay work. Since capacity and WIP (work in progress) items are continually forecasted, monitored, and adjusted with lean, bottlenecks are anticipated in advance, every team member participates, and no one’s time is wasted.

3. Fewer costs (and fewer surprises!) 💸

Eliminating waste means saving money—no matter the industry. Overproduction, having too many materials to store, overhiring, and production bottlenecks are expensive and wasteful. These wastes can be eliminated with better management of processes and systems, enabling companies to always have the right number of employees, amount of materials, and working hours at any given time.

Adopting the lean methodology means increasing efficiency, which benefits any company’s bottom line. Make sure every cost is accounted for and necessary to the production process by consistently reviewing your company’s work processes and eliminating any costs that don’t add value.

4. Systems can adapt better and faster 🌎

Businesses today must adapt faster than ever due to increasing customer demand, rapidly evolving technological advancements, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The larger the size of the organization, the harder it is to adapt. Long-running business systems were not designed to be flexible, so when adjustments need to be made, it may take months or years before the entire organization is on the same page.

With lean, teams can better adapt. Lean systems aren’t as rigid, so it’s easier to make adjustments along the way, meaning teams will better adjust for unexpected circumstances. The lean methodology can help any business, no matter its size, adapt to changing times gracefully, as lean is the exact opposite of a set it and forget it process.

5. Stakeholder visibility and strong customer relationships 💞

The lean methodology leans into both stakeholder and customer needs, which results in a better end product. Progress in lean is measured based on the value delivered to the customer instead of the completion of tasks.

With lean, customer value is paramount. Every project and task begins with considering the point of view of customers and putting yourself in their shoes. Feedback is gathered alongside product development instead of at the end to ensure new information is considered and that the final product will be exactly what the customer needs or wants.

6. Continuous improvement mindset 🧠

Lean is the enemy of the status quo. Lean demands the constant fine-tuning and refinement of processes and enables a continuous improvement mindset. It’s not a “set it and forget it” process, as lean is all about consistent process improvement. No matter how successful or efficient the company is, there is always room for improvement and new, innovative ways to bring value to the customer.

This attitude instills a continuous improvement mindset in everyone involved on the team, whether it’s a small development team or an entire lean enterprise (SAFe). Teams can anticipate and expect regular feedback from leaders, managers, and stakeholders. With lean, innovations and iterations are less precious and more plentiful. The team continues to improve and fine-tune their skills and processes with each passing product.

7. Increased team engagement 🤝

Employee disengagement is expensive. Disengaged employees have higher absenteeism, lower productivity, and lower profitability — all of which can majorly drain a company’s resources. If a company’s culture doesn’t inspire employees to show up and do their best, that company is going to hemorrhage money every year until its bottom line bottoms out.

A lean organization, on the other hand, puts teams on the frontline of product development. Under lean management, employees have direct and regular contact with managers about how their work is going and how the process could be improved. Since teams are more involved in the process, they are more engaged and more likely to actively participate, provide feedback, and buy into their work.

Engaged employees are a company’s greatest asset. Bringing everyone into the process gives teams ownership over the outcomes, boosting their creativity as well as their accountability. Increased team engagement means enhanced efficiency, effectiveness, and team morale.

You can apply the lean methodology anywhere to reduce waste and improve efficiency. Let’s recap. The top benefits of adopting lean include:

1. Increased efficiency

2. Reduced bottlenecks

3. Fewer costs (and fewer surprises!)

4. Better and faster systemic adaptation

5. Stakeholder visibility and strong customer relationships

6. Continuous improvement mindset

7. Increased team engagement

Agile made easy

Easy Agile can help your agile team work better together to deliver for your customers. We have a suite of agile apps for Jira designed to put the customer first through every step of the product development process. From team agility with Easy Agile TeamRhythm, to scaled agility with Easy Agile Programs, our plugins work with multiple agile frameworks, including Kanban and Scrum.

If you work with Jira, you’ll find our lean tools especially helpful for improving the functionality of your workflows and enhancing team collaboration.

Lean principles focus on delivering greater customer value by using minimal resources. Enterprises use these lean principles to practice continuous improvement based. They base their improvements partly on the practice of zero waste.

Here, you can improve your knowledge about lean principles to increase productivity. You can also use software tools to support positive change in your work environment.  A lean-agile team is more productive and team members get to share their new knowledge.

The history of lean principles

Inspired by Ford’s mass manufacturing system, Eiji Toyoda created the "Toyota Production System.” This served their customers and introduced "Just-in-Time" (JIT) manufacturing.

JIT means only stocking enough vehicles to streamline rapid production. By only keeping an inventory of required parts on hand, a company saves money and time.

Starting here, the lean methodology has evolved over time. Now, lean consists of three main concepts of purpose, people, and processes.

The purpose of lean concepts is to give the customer what they want, reduce waste, and focus on employee morale. It also encourages accountability. Lean promotes ownership of work, problems, and successes.

Overview of lean principles

Organizations use lean principles to enhance overall performance. They do this by being careful how they use their scarce resources to meet customer demand.

The concept and practice of lean principles include:

1. Elimination of waste
2. Incorporating quality via end customer value
3. Generating knowledge among team members
4. Postponing workflow commitments
5. Produce rapid delivery
6. Respecting people
7. Encouraging holistic process improvements

Practicing the lean principles

The lean principles require lean processes and lean tools. Therefore, if you want a lean organization, the leadership must support lean thinking and provide employees (people) with the tools to achieve this aim.

Here’s how to enact the lean principles:

Focus on value

This means producing products that customers want by encouraging them to provide details and feedback about products and services.

Kaizen is a part of Japanese philosophy that highlights the elimination of waste in a quest to change for the better, thus producing greater customer value.

Use value stream mapping

This process involves mapping out all the people and the actions needed to deliver a desirable end product. You get to see which processes work and which do not add value. You also have a better chance of identifying bottlenecks before they become a problem.

Once you do a bottleneck analysis, you can eliminate obstacles and improve processes. A bottleneck analysis involves getting to the root cause of what is holding up completion of the work and finding better processes to align all work batches that are dependent on each other.

Develop a logical workflow

To do this, you’ll focus on implementing the correct steps to create value in a logical sequence.

You can help streamline workflows by using Scrum sprint principles and break the work into smaller parts. You can also use tools like strategic roadmaps to visualize and improve Scrum or Kanban workflows.

Develop a pull system

A pull system ensures that teams know what to do and when, so they use less effort in creating outputs.

A pull system responds to demand. If there is a demand for a product, you respond by doing whatever is necessary to meet that demand. Knowing there is demand helps reduce non-value processes and optimize resources by using JIT or Kanban.

Encourage continuous improvement

You can use the Kaizen approach and other elements of the lean philosophy to enhance continuous improvement by constantly finding ways to do things better.

One way to do things better is to continue checking your value stream mapping to ensure that everyone stays on board. You must also ensure that all employees participate in lean processes and actively look for ways to improve the supply chain.

The benefits of implementing lean processes

Any organization that wants to take the lean principles route can anticipate some excellent benefits.

Several of these benefits include:

• Improving team member and team communications
• Empowering people to make decisions and engage in ongoing positive change
• Developing integrated cross-functional teams who share knowledge and skills
• Enhancing end goal delivery to augment end customer value
• Reducing the overall time to deliver that value to customers

Besides using Scrum stand-up meetings and software development tools and processes, you can use more lean tools to create a team or organization that embraces lean thinking.

Lean principles tools

Organizations can use metrics such as sales data and customer feedback as tools to assess customer demand. But, only after identifying the value can organizations use the lean tool of value stream mapping to further their end goal.

You can also browse through the information resources at the Lean Enterprise Institute to learn more about lean principles. You can also explore other lean thinking such as Six Sigma, Error Proofing, Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA), and other tools to support a lean organization.

Jira software tools from Easy Agile

Easy Agile provides organizations and teams with multiple tools to help streamline their workflows. For instance, you can use Jira to help develop logical workflows and get your teams up to speed on lean thinking.

Tools like Easy Agile Scrum Workflow for Jira are available at no cost to ease this positive change. Another tool that complements value stream mapping is Easy Agile Programs for Jira.

Adopting lean principles is much easier with the support of Easy Agile resources, so get your lean team going today.

Creating a product roadmap in Jira can fulfill a few really important roles.

1. It can establish a vision for an agile team struggling for momentum.
2. It can communicate to the broader business what you’re planning to work on in future iterations or sprints.
3. It can help the product manager visually record dependencies between issues.

Bonus: by creating a Jira roadmap you won’t need to track down that one you created in Google Sheets or PowerPoint (or did I create it as a table in Confluence?) 🤷

Sorted. Sold. Show me how!

Ok — this is how you can create a free roadmap in Jira using Easy Agile Roadmaps:

Step 1. Go to the Atlassian Marketplace

Hop over to the Atlassian Marketplace page for Easy Agile Roadmaps.

Step 2. Start and install free 30 day evaluation

Press the yellow ‘Try now’ button to start your 30 day free evaluation. This means you can create a full roadmap and impress your team before you decide if it’s right for you.

You’ll need admin rights on your Jira to start a free evaluation. Or buy coffee for someone who does.

Choose from Cloud, Server or Data Center (whichever Jira hosting type your company uses).

Step 3. Open the roadmap

Once Easy Agile Roadmaps is installed, each Scrum and Kanban board in Jira will have a linked roadmap.

To open it up, look for the Roadmaps icon found in the Project Sidebar for all agile boards on Jira Server and for single-project agile boards on Jira Cloud.

If you’re on a multi-project agile board on Jira Cloud, the roadmap link can be found in the ‘…’ dropdown on the top right of your agile board screen.

Step 4. Add your first item to the Jira roadmap

Your blank roadmap should now be staring at you. ✅

You can add any issue type to a team’s roadmap. To access the issues from a team’s agile board, select the blue button marked either “Issues” or “Epics” in the top right of the roadmap.

Select the ‘Options’ dropdown to check the issue types you would like to appear in your roadmap backlog.

Then, drag and drop onto the roadmap. You can adjust the start and end dates and phasing of each issue by dragging the left or right ends of the coloured boxes.

If you’d like to send your roadmap to someone who doesn’t use Jira, you can export it as a PDF.

Congratulations! You just created a product roadmap in Jira. Now you can show it off to your team and delete your excel roadmaps FOREVER.

There’s a ton of other features that comes with Easy Agile Roadmaps, like Themes, Version Markers and Date Markers.

We’ll cover that in a future post. You can try out all of these in the free 30 day evaluation.

But for now, bask in the glory of your new roadmap.

Sit back and marvel at what you have created. You deserve it.

Try roadmapping today with Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira

👉 👉 Read next: Principles of an Agile Product Roadmap

There is a HUGE difference between managing a single project versus the kind of project management large organizations require for aligning multiple projects, teams, and departments. Project portfolio management at the enterprise level is a whole other beast that requires reliable and scalable enterprise project management software (EPM software) that meets the needs of your business.

There are so many effective enterprise project management software tools available today that making a decision can become overwhelming. How do you know which platform is best for your business, and how will your project teams and teams of teams perform based on the project management system you choose?

Learn more about the top enterprise project management tools, including what to look for and what features are available for the most popular EPM software.

Looking to achieve team alignment at scale?

Want more focused team planning?

Try Easy Agile Programs

What to look for in enterprise project management software

Since each organization has different needs, there’s no single best EPM software. It depends completely on the features you’re looking for, what the team needs, and personal preferences.

Here’s what to look for and keep in mind when choosing an enterprise project management solution:

• Messaging and collaboration tools that aid communication among team members and among various business teams and departments
• Calendars for tracking due dates and deadlines
• Customizable automations
• Gantt chart capabilities that provide a visual representation of project progress, due dates, who’s working on what, and how tasks are connected
• Other project views, such as calendars or Kanban boards
• Time tracking and timesheet capabilities
• File sharing with varying degrees of functionality, including user permissions or enabling versioning
• Accounting and expense tracking
• Ways to analyze data with metrics and dynamic reporting and features
• Intuitive, user-friendly interfaces that are easy to implement and onboard
• Integrations with other enterprise-level software, such as Salesforce, Dropbox, Slack, etc.

Easy Agile Roadmaps: Align your team around the vision for a product and how they'll sequence features for delivery to customers.

Try Now

The best enterprise project management software

Below we’ve outlined the benefits of six of the most popular EPM software products. Know that there isn’t one right answer, and in the end, choosing the right tools depends on your business needs, how your teams work, and the features you need to work at your best. The following software products are robust and scalable so that you can utilize them across your entire enterprise and continue to grow your business without outgrowing your resource management software.

1. Jira

Jira is ideal for software development teams and those utilizing other agile tools and processes, such as the Scrum framework. Jira helps enterprise teams design workflows, monitor capacity, and identify dependencies before any slowdown occurs. This ensures work continues rolling out smoothly and stakeholders and users are delivered continuous value.

The benefits of Jira include:

• Using @mention alerts and other collaboration functions to align tasks
• Creating clear action items
• Visibly tracking work with customizable workflows
• Prioritizing tasks based on what’s most important
• Distributing work evenly across the team based on capacity
• Identifying potential bottlenecks before they occur
• Creating user stories for a customer-centric approach
• Addressing product issues
• Viewing product release statuses
• Using automations to reduce repetitive work
• Accessing real-time metrics and data
• Integrations for the tools you already use, such as Confluence, Bitbucket, Slack, Microsoft Teams, GitHub, and many more

📣 Jira is one of our favorite agile resources. We’ve developed a suite of Jira plugins, including Easy Agile User Story Maps for clear visualization of the customer journey and Easy Agile Programs for Jira, a complete PI Planning solution for agile teams.

2. Asana

Asana is among the best enterprise project management software and has over a million paid users, including Amazon, PayPal, and Airbnb. Asana Enterprise gives enterprises access to its full suite of work management features, admin capabilities, and data control, allowing large companies to scale quickly and securely.

The benefits of Asana include:

• Choosing the project view that suits your style, including calendar, lists, boards, and timeline
• Organizing and assigning tasks with lists that show teams what they need to do, which tasks are the priority, and when work is due
• Mapping work to manage and align overlapping, dependent, or unscheduled tasks
• Automating routine work
• Utilizing boards and real-time charts to visualize workflows, determine potential bottlenecks, and keep work on track
• Over 200+ integrations

3. Wrike

Wrike is enterprise management software that’s been named a Forrester leader, meaning it’s software that has been thoroughly evaluated by experts and is strongly recommended. Wrike enables users to customize dashboards, workflows, request forms, and more. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate results through smart automation and project risk prediction. You can customize the features you need to streamline and prioritize projects and tasks with interactive, drag-and-drop Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and purpose-built workflows.

The benefits of Wrike include:

• Organizing file management by enabling versioning
• Sharing tasks among team members
• Utilizing visual proofing and automated approval systems to streamline feedback
• Keeping on track with visual timelines that align everyone’s tasks
• Eliminating silos with clear visibility across departments
• Utilizing advanced communication tools, such as voice commands, smart replies, and document processing
• Generating reports from real-time data

4. Monday.com

Monday.com is a top enterprise project management software that features customizable, visually intuitive, and simple-to-use layouts designed to illuminate the order in which tasks should be completed. It’s also highly scalable, which is why it’s software that’s preferred by large, well-known enterprises such as Adobe, Uber, and Coca-Cola.

The benefits of monday.com include:

• Getting started quickly with customizable templates
• Tracking hours, timelines, and documents
• Easily seeing notable deadlines and overdue tasks
• Automating repetitive tasks to avoid human error
• Accessing multiple views, such as calendar and Kanban
• Supporting your company’s preferred methodology (lean, agile, and more) with templates, automation, and integrations
• Integrating the platform in a few clicks with your existing tools, such as Jira, Slack, Google Drive, Trello, and more

5. Celoxis

Celoxis is a wide-ranging, web-based platform that enables effective collaboration and project portfolio management. It is particularly helpful for enterprises working with distributed teams operating in different time zones as well as for organizations that want to use EPM software to collaborate with stakeholders directly.

The benefits of Celoxis include:

• Viewing task management in multiple formats, including Gantt and Kanban
• Building dynamic project plans
• Collaborating with @mentions, comments, file sharing, and more
• Connecting with stakeholders through portals for collaboration, discussions, and file sharing
• Monitoring issue and bug tracking
• Assigning work based on capacity, availability, and skills for simplified resource allocation budgets, receivables, and profitability across multiple portfolios
• Utilizing version controls
• Producing analytics and interactive data
• Over 400 integrations with other business applications

6. Trello

Trello originally came on the scene as a simple and collaborative digital Kanban tool. It’s the traditional To-do, Doing, and Done format packaged in an intuitive platform that’s now used by over one million teams worldwide. The visual appeal of Trello is offered to enterprise-level organizations with additional features designed for large teams and multiple departments.

The benefits of Trello include:

• Emphasizing work with visual boards
• Editing with intuitive drag-and-drop
• Choosing from a long list of customizable views, including timelines, tables, dashboards, calendars, and maps
• Ensuring everyone’s voice is heard with a voting feature
• Viewing which cards haven’t been seen in a while with a card aging feature
• Setting up advanced permissions for increased security (bulk deactivation and invite restrictions)
• Archiving items that can be brought back in motion if needed
• Using automations for fewer clicks

Find a platform that can grow with you

What matters most when choosing enterprise project management software is that you move beyond basic project management features to a system that will allow you to manage a portfolio of complex projects across a number of different business teams. You need to be able to grow with your platform as your business scales and evolves.

Choosing software that doesn’t work for your team, hinders productivity, or needs to be changed down the line is a costly mistake that can derail your projects, potentially damaging both team morale and customer perception. If you’re still not sure which platform is best for you or whether it’s worth making the switch, we encourage you to reach out to project managers and industry leaders for honest feedback on what it’s like working with each platform at the enterprise level.

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For more articles from us surrounding agile methodologies, the Scrum process, how-to guides, and more, follow the Easy Agile blog.

Raise your hand if you've ever had an argument, oops 😳 — I mean a heated discussion — on how to set up and organize Jira. Yeah, us too.

Some hotly contested topics include:

• Project: Is it best to organize by team, by function, by feature, or by product?
• Agile epics, features, stories, tasks, sub-tasks, bugs — what should you use and when?
• Sprint board column headings and swimlanes — we're not even going there.

Unfortunately, there isn't one best workflow in Jira or any tool your agile team uses. More important than your workflow is setting up your team members to consistently deliver business value to your end-users. The goal of your agile project management is to enable and support your Scrum team in this endeavor.

We're going to take a look at one aspect of your process — through the epics agile teams use. Stick with us, and we'll explain what an epic is, why agile epics are important, and how to avoid some epic mistakes.

What is an epic?

Simply put, an epic is a bucket that holds smaller work items that must be completed to satisfy the task. Some people think of epics as a big user story. That's fine if it helps you visualize it, but epics are quite different from stories.

• Agile teams use epics differently for planning or not at all.
  While your team might be able to give it a t-shirt size, the amount of work in an epic is usually too large to be estimated in story points. Some epics are so large that they need to be broken down into smaller epics before you even ask for team estimates.
• An epic isn't written like a user story.
  You know the template — “As a user, I want to X so that I can Y.” That’s perfect for a user story, but not so much for an epic. An epic example might be "Add cross-sells" with a description that lists places where the Product Owner would like to present the end-user with opportunities to purchase related products. That’s not a story, but a request for functionality.
• The epic might be acting as a placeholder for work that is yet to be defined.
  Your Product Owner may use epics as placeholders on a product roadmap for long-term planning. They'll wait to define the work until the implementation time frame is closer.
• An epic is rarely completed in a single sprint.
  Because of their size, epics typically don't fit within one iteration. Your software development team slices functionality so they can deliver working software each sprint. This may mean they complete a story or two from an epic for two sprints, skip a sprint, and then go back to stories in that epic the next sprint.
• Epics may or may not have acceptance criteria.
  Some Scrum teams don't require epics to have acceptance criteria because it's included in the stories. If all the child stories meet what the Scrum defines as the Definition of Done, the epic is also Done.

Epics are parents and grandparents to stories and tasks. Development teams don't work on epics but rather code to the smaller user stories under the epic.

The importance of epics in your agile practice

Don't underestimate the organizational value epics bring to your product backlog. Corralling 10 or 20 related backlog items can be disruptive in sprint planning. Epics present a more cohesive look at the work and allow your Scrum team to see the big picture.

Epics offer executives and product managers a high-level overview of work in progress and what’s coming in the future.

Product Owners use epics to create a product plan from a business perspective. Current business goals may dictate that development work is focused on a particular feature represented by epics. By contrast, epics also help Product Owners plan sprints with an appropriate work ratio from multiple epics. Product Owners can take a step back from the detailed user stories and make sure each iteration contains stories from several epics to satisfy multiple stakeholders.

The way epics are visually represented in product backlogs and roadmaps is critical for long-term planning. Can you imagine planning a six-month roadmap at the user story level? It would be chaos!

Agile frameworks encourage — no — demand the ability to adjust course as needed to meet changing stakeholder needs, market demands, and business goals. Epics allow you to easily and quickly adapt your roadmaps in response to change.

How epics add value to agile development

Discovery is a big aspect of agile methodologies and product management. At the beginning of this process, your teams will be event storming, creating personas, and building journey maps. The actionable output of those activities is easily logged and organized in Jira with epics.

As those epics are further refined, they're added to a roadmap and then put on a Refinement ceremony agenda. During Refinement, the Scrum team members engage in user story mapping exercises and begin to build the detail needed for the development team to execute.

While epics provide a less detailed view of features and requests from your Product Owner, they are critical to the creation of user stories. Without the cohesive view of your sprint backlog presented through epics, agile sprints are at risk of delivering a lot of unrelated work that delivers little value.

When not to use an epic

So, while we love the agile epic, it's not perfect for everything. Here are some things to avoid when using epics.

The evergreen epic

You know the one. The epic was created when people stopped using wired telephone lines and has been lingering in your backlog in a semi-complete state ever since. Deep within, you'll find user stories and tasks, maybe with little or no relation to each other. This poor epic has become the dumping ground for orphaned stories that didn't find a home anywhere else.

Evergreen epics can be the result of a change in either business goals or product features. That’s great — you've adapted! Now you need to update your epic to reflect that. Stories can be removed, code can be deployed or shelved, and incomplete stories can be deleted or removed from the epic and reprioritized.

Brainstorming is also a cause for evergreen epics. Above, we mentioned that output from UX activities is a great way to manage actionable items. We did not say to use epics as a home for every idea that came up during brainstorming that may or may not ever make it to your roadmap.

Epics are not intended to live forever. They represent a body of work that will deliver value to your end-users and need to be completed so you can measure the results of your efforts. Evergreen epics clutter your roadmap, blurring your focus, and limiting its planning value.

The theme epic

It's easy to assign stories to epics because they're related to a specific area in the product, touch a certain code base, or satisfy an individual or group of stakeholders. That's not the purpose of an epic. Themes are a better choice for grouping work by attributes other than a specific feature implementation.

You can accomplish your organizational goals by using themes to link these stories while maintaining the integrity of scope within your epic.

Use epics to focus on specific deliverables or features. Related or not, if a story within an epic doesn't contribute to the primary focus of the epic, remove it. That doesn't mean it's not important or the right work to do during the iteration. It just means it's not part of that epic.

Being diligent about epic scope keeps your estimates cleaner and more useful for future planning. Unnecessary stories in epics inflate their estimates and actual efforts. If you ever need to look back at older work items, you probably won't remember that adding two unrelated stories was what bumped an epic from a medium to a large. If you’re using that old work item as a guide for future planning, you’ve just overestimated the effort because you didn’t limit the scope to the objective of the epic.

Keep in mind — not every story needs an epic parent. Some stories stand well on their own and might be better visualized and planned through themes.

The release epic

A release is not an epic. A release is a specific set of code and files that are bundled together and delivered to production at the same time. A release may include an epic or many epics, or it may not. But in itself, a release is not an epic.

There are excellent tools on the market developed specifically to help you with release management. By all means, assign your epics to a release, but use release tools to organize your releases and use epics to organize your features.

Epics are more than a large user story

Your agile coach or Scrum Master has probably drilled you on the Principles of Agile Software, so you know the following quote from the 12 Principles of Agile Software:

"Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done — is essential."

But what does it have to do with epics?

Epics simplify your backlog. They allow you to focus on the right things at the right time and keep out the noise. They keep your eye on the ball when it comes to prioritizing value and ignoring the ankle-biter work in your backlog.

We believe using epics makes for better organization in your backlog and better planning for your agile teams. Epics help you deliver value sooner by keeping you focused on the big picture and out of the weeds.

If you want a more contextual view of your epics and user stories in Jira, try Easy Agile TeamRhythm. The highly-visual story map format transforms the flat Jira backlog into a meaningful picture of work, making it easier to manage your backlog and plan sprints or versions.