A successful product launch requires full alignment across multiple teams, and it all starts with project planning . From product leadership to engineering to stakeholders, your team has a perspective on what should be built next. You don’t want to check off the project plan, only for partners to flag that they disagree with the priority or scope of a project. To make sure your team is all on the same page, and not risk go-to-market delays, you need to give all project partners the opportunity to contribute and give feedback during the planning stage.
InVision wanted to make its own project planning more inclusive, visual, and collaborative, so they built an integration with one of their most used tools—Jira. The integrations product squad got extra meta and pressure-tested the Jira integration for Freehand (a feature they built!) to plan post-MVP updates.
Here, we show you the anatomy of the cross-functional InVision team going from MVP to follow-on improvements—and everything in between—to ultimately enhance the Jira integration experience you see today.
Connect what you already have
InVision’s integrations product squad needs to work fast! Every tool that is built into Freehand is pivotal to their users, especially tools that reduce friction in product collaboration workflows that can often feel clunkier than necessary.
Carolina Puncernau Torra, the integration squad’s product manager, started with the Jira Project Prioritization template (told you it would be meta) in Freehand. She imported existing Jira issues to the canvas for updates the squad had already scoped out. Carolina also embedded Google and Mode documents for the project so stakeholders could review related work and follow app usage to help them make informed decisions when planning out the next step of the Jira integration.
Get stakeholder input and prioritize together
Then it was time for a prioritization exercise. Here were a few of Carolina’s steps to collaborative success:
- Ask the team to add any new feature ideas to the canvas as sticky notes.
- Appoint a lead (in this case Carolina) to take a first pass on prioritizing those improvements based on feedback gathered from the beta group and internal team.
- Organize those updates into a Kanban board, making it easy to visualize Jira issue priority.
Ensure team alignment before locking it in
Now it was time to really hone in on what updates the team will tackle first. Here’s how Carolina got the product team involved quickly:
- Invite product and engineering stakeholders to jump into the Freehand and move sticky notes or add comments to give input on the first pass prioritization exercise.
- Share with product leadership for confirmation that the team is on the right track with what improvements should be made in what order.
- Confirm agreement on high priority updates, such as making improvements to the new Jira issue creation flow, and adding search functionality and filters to the import experience.
With the team alignment in place, Carolina used the Jira integration to turn those ideas into synced Jira issues.
Ready, set, build!
The team then started immediately actioning on those prioritized follow-ons. Because Jira issues in Freehand connect in real-time to the team’s Jira instance, as the engineering team builds these improvements and makes updates in Jira, those status updates are reflected in Freehand. This way, non-engineering stakeholders can follow progress and close the dreaded feedback loop faster and more effectively.
