JIRA.

During a Product Manager's career lifetime, one of the tools you NEED to add to your arsenal is JIRA. You will need it for your product's development stage because of how it manages to sync everything for every team you will work with.

It was a 'no brainer' that we were asked to work with it for this week's task. In fact, when the task for the week came and we saw "Jira", I imagined some of my teammates shrugging (lol).

If you don't already know, Jira is one of the softwares created by Atlassian—the same company responsible for other products like Trello, Confluence, Bamboo, to mention a few—used to plan, track and manage agile product team. With Jira, you can customize your workflow as a Product manager by creating smaller chunks of tasks and assigning same to members of your team. You can create user stories, roadmaps, etc for the features you're incorporating into your product. But that's not all, you can also collaborate with other team within your company, and integrate apps into Jira from the Jira marketplace. Apps that Product managers, Product design and Engineers will find very resourceful. As with many softwares, Jira has both the free version and the paid version.

Let's go back to the task...

DAY ONE - April 17th, 2023

As expected, our Admin sent out every team's task and PMs were asked to create a “direct messaging app” project on Jira, prioritize and organize our backlog into sprints, run scrum ceremonies, and more, all within Jira Software. For this task, we were not required to work with the Product Design team.

The Team Lead sent out a notice for a virtual meeting by 8pm on Google meet, to discuss the task and how to embark on it.

The meeting ended positively and he proposed to send out general subtasks for all members of the team.

DAY TWO - April 18th, 2023

As promised, the Team Lead sent out the subtask to our slack channel.

The content read: Tomorrow Each Person is expected to submit a list of 7 Features Of A Direct Messaging (Messenger,WhatsApp,Telegram,) And Their User Story. Put it in a doc , we will review it together and create our backlog. Use this resource below to understand how to use Jira because tomorrow we go ahead to form the Backlog and everyone will participate using their own user story they presented

atlassian.com/agile/tutorials/how-to-do-scr..

Then, a virtual meeting was scheduled by 8pm and we were informed that we would all be discussing our work and sharing our screens.

That evening, we discussed all our features and prioritised only important features. A teammate who had a better understanding of Jira tried to explain what he could and the meeting ended positively with a promise of teammates sharing more YouTube videos explaining Jira to other teammates who found it harder grasping the software.

DAY THREE - April 19th, 2023

Two teammates shared some YouTube tutorial videos on Jira and the team lead scheduled a virtual meeting that evening.

The meeting focused largely on creating backlogs for each feature from the ones we selected the previous day, creating user stories and acceptance criteria for them.

The meeting ended on a positive note.

DAY FOUR - April 20th, 2023

The Team lead scheduled a virtual meeting for 8pm to discuss sprint planning.

The Assistant Team lead was assigned the task of documenting this week's task on hashnode, while another teammate was assigned the task of documenting same on Twitter.

DAY FIVE - April 21st, 2023

We had our first task review!

So, Sidehustle bootcamp tasks are reviewed after submission. Reviews are typically conducted throughout the next week after submission links for previous tasks have closed. During the review, all the teams under a particular department will be accessed and given a score for their task. The review is virtual and the team lead of every team will be expected to share their screen and do a presentation of their work. After the presentation, the instructor will speak on it, give corrections where needed, and finally give a score.

Our review was conducted by our instructor from the internship, Mrs Damilola Asuelimen.

Our team went first and our Team lead gave the presentation. After the presentation, the following observations were made on the PRD we made;

1. "Change history" should be directly under "Introduction". On our work, it was at the end of our PRD.

2. Success metrics should have percentages. For eg, "User adoption should increase by 50%". Also, success metrics should be broken down in quarters so that it will be easier to measure the success of the product throughout the year. Our work did not have that.

3. The Q&A should focus on questions that real users will ask, not what we think users may ask. On our work, the Q&A was what we thought users may ask.

4. Our roadmap needs to be better.

5. Our Userflow was not okay. On our work, it was discovered after submission, that the Product design team we worked with changed the Userflow on our PRD at the last minute, to fit into what they designed.

All those mistakes reduced our grade to 85%. It was not so bad for a first task and it ended up pumping everybody for future reviews.

We were asked by our Admin to submit our task the next day, Saturday, April 22nd 2023, because of the public holiday, as against the usual Friday submission.

DAY SIX - April 22, 2023

Today marked the final day of the submission.

Here's a link to our work: drive.google.com/drive/folders/11_BcfYul7dl..

Written by: Chosen Royalty Olukanwi

Contributors to the task include: Chosen Royalty Olukanwi, Eden Okerezi, Taiwo Olorunsola, Olajumoke Olajide, Agudosi Oluchi, Collins Akpaka, Aishat Subair, and Christian Linus