From Jira to one roadmap: showing what you are working on now

Jira is excellent at tickets and terrible at answering the founder's question: what are we working on, and are we on time? Epics help, but an epic is still a bucket of tickets. The feature the company is actually shipping spans several epics, has a start and an expected end that nobody wrote down, and shows 0% until the last ticket closes.

Name the feature, above the epics

The first move is to give the feature a name of its own: "Partner portal", "Mobile 2.0", "Billing v2". A super admin sets it as what the company works on now, picks the epics behind it, and says who is on it. Everyone sees it, and each person sees their own tickets first. That alone replaces the Monday meeting.

Give it dates, and judge against them

A feature gets a start and an expected end. So does each epic, either by dates or by the sprints it is planned for, set in the portal without touching Jira. Then the system can say something useful: 46% of the time is used and 23% of the work is done. On track, behind, overdue. Not a feeling, a number.

The year roadmap draws every feature as one bar across quarters and sprints, finished ones included. It becomes the record of what the company did, and the plan of what comes next, on one screen.

Let progress follow your statuses

The 0%-until-done problem comes from counting only closed tickets. Your workflow has more states than that, and each one means something: in development, code review, QA, live testing. A progress policy gives each Jira status a share of done, read from the statuses your projects really have, and the progress of an epic becomes the average over its stories. A story in QA counts for 70% if that is what QA means to you. The policy is yours; the defaults follow Jira's own categories.

Keep Jira as the source of tickets

None of this requires leaving Jira. Tickets are synced both ways: people move their own tickets and comment from the portal, the change goes through a queue that survives Jira being slow, and the reason shows when Jira refuses. The roadmap reads from Jira; the plan and the policy live in the portal, where the people who run the company can change them.

What it looks like after a month

• The founders open the roadmap instead of asking.
• Leads plan epics by sprints and see the verdict move as the sprint goes.
• Nobody argues about percentages, because the policy says what they mean.

See the roadmap views, or bring your own Jira and we will set it up on a call.