In product management, there are so many things to communicate every single day. On our team we hit a point where communicating and remember decisions was becoming painful. We needed a place to communicate with each other and our stakeholders. It needed to fill the gap between formal Confluence documentation and Jira tickets and our posts in Slack. Enter, blogging in Jira for better product management!
It was one of the senior engineers who suggested blogging and pointed out that Jira has a blogging function. We decided to try it and it quickly became an indispensable tool for me, as a PM. It was so easy to link back to those posts when asked why we did something a certain way or when too much time had gone by for us to remember the detail of a decision. We’ve started writing posts in roughly the following categories, to keep our stakeholders, and ourselves, up-to-date:
- Decisions made
- Design rationales
- Detailed problem definition (usually at the start of a project)
- Technical explanations in laypersons’ terms
- Long-term visions for features
- Requests for feedback on the way specific things should work
- Things we’re trying for scrum ceremonies
Technical tips for blogging directly in Jira
Though blogging in Jira is not nearly as robust as it is in WordPress, it has a bunch of advantages. You can link your posts to your tickets and epics, as well as to your other documentation in Confluence. In my opinion, tickets should be reserved for technical specs, requirements, acceptance criteria, notes and the like. The Jira blog post fills a communication void in a way that all of your internal stakeholders can appreciate but still links back to your formal documentation.
If you blog in Jira, you can link your posts to Slack (with an integration). This means that the specific channel you use gets updated when someone comments or edits the post. We don’t use this for every post, but in the cases where we’re looking for feedback, it’s invaluable in encouraging stakeholders to engage. They see, in Slack, what other people are saying and tend to jump in with their own thoughts. On a recent request for feedback, we saw our blog post give us much more feedback than a sprint review, all because of blog comments posted to Slack.
Blogging to save time
Blogging about our work in Jira, has also personally saved me a ton of time. If I’m asked a question about something, I can simply send the link to the post I wrote, instead of typing out an answer multiple times. It also helps when working with your scrum team. If someone is out sick or has forgotten why we did something, they can self-serve the information they’re looking for. Lately, many members of our team have started contributing to the blog too, making it an awesome space for collaboration.
If you are finding gaps in your ability to communicate as a product manager, I’d encourage you to try blogging in Jira! Your categories and reasons for blogging can be anything but it’ll help you keep everyone informed, and save you some time too!
Kate Moore Hermes 