Managing a product is no easy feat — it involves juggling a wide range of tasks, from planning and tracking to executing and releasing. Jira and Acclaim Products are two complementary product management tools that product managers use to help them complete these tasks.
The awkward reality is that product people have no choice but, to use development-based tools like Jira to understand the status and scope of projects from their development and engineering teams. Let’s face it while this information is needed, it is very tactical view of product status and updates. What is needed is more strategic and business focused information on the health of your products, powerful workboards that you can visualize tradeoffs and an easy way to inform product stakeholders of changes. What is needed is Acclaim Products.
Jira and Acclaim Products complement each other – while both tools support release planning, user story and task management, and development work tracking, each offers unique strengths that suit different aspects of product management. Together, Jira and Acclaim Products make for a powerful toolset that product managers can use to manage their products with ease.
With Jira, tangible ROI is measured by work completed by a specific time, and intangible ROI is measured by confidence in the team’s ability to deliver the product. The tangible ROI of Acclaim Products is communicating the value of the product and all the supporting details; the intangible ROI is feeling in control of all the moving pieces it takes to get a product approved, developed, and to market.
Identifying Jira’s key strengths and weaknesses
Jira is a widely used, agile project management tool that primarily applies to the works of software development teams. It offers a range of features that allow these teams to plan, track, and release software updates using an agile methodology.
Jira is a great tool for:
- Product developers
- Project managers
- Software engineers
- Software companies
Jira is great for managing tasks and tracking progress. It can provide the details of what is being built and the speed the work is being completed. It also has features, such as user story mapping and product road mapping, but they primarily apply to software companies' and engineers' work.
Jira is designed for delivery teams building specific aspects of the product, including the way they work and tracking their progress as a work burndown. This makes Jira a great tool for product development, which focuses on solution delivery and the project managers responsible for planning and tracking solution delivery.
Where Jira falls short as a product management tool:
- Inability to track the relationship between work items to business value
- Lacking reasons behind why one work item is prioritized over another
- Justification of who the product serves and what it solves for them
- Alignment of the goals and strategy of the product
Still, Jira remains a popular tool for product management. Many companies understand the need to manage work and predict completion and time to market but overlook the many steps involved in the process. Focused on actual product creation, they neglect that there are deliverables to manage before the development team begins and throughout the product's lifecycle.
Where Acclaim Products excels
Unlike Jira, a project management tool with some product management features, Acclaim Products is a dedicated product management software tool. It helps product people manage all aspects of their jobs, answering important questions like why, for whom, and what.
Acclaim Products is a great tool for:
- Product management
- Product innovation
- Product people in all industries
Acclaim Products empowers product managers to think about the consumer and the value the product brings to the business during the development process, which promotes product innovation in a way that Jira can't.
Product managers gain the tools they need to prepare work for their team, manage and track that work, monitor the product's success after release, plan for future iterations, and stay on top of the product's health and viability throughout its entire lifecycle.
Additionally, more broad terminology makes Acclaim Products easy to use for product people in any industry. It has pre-defined KPIs that represent a variety of industries and the option to create custom KPIs as well.
Why Acclaim Products and Jira work better together
When product people try to use Jira only, they require additional products to track their activities, product strategy, and how their Jira tickets align with the company strategy, and then cobble it all together to provide frequent updates to a variety of stakeholders.
While Jira excels at managing the development process and tracking project progress, Acclaim Products allows product people to seamlessly integrate their product roadmap with the development process, ensuring that the right features are prioritized and developed on time. This is why companies need to invest in both Jira and Acclaim Products.
Jira is a powerful tool for staying organized and efficient while managing day-to-day tasks like backlog management, sprint planning, and bug tracking, making it perfect for tactical responsibilities. On the other hand, Acclaim Products is more valuable when it comes to strategic tasks – like defining the product vision, building the roadmap, setting goals and KPIs, and aligning business and product goals.
Acclaim Products provides a high-level view of product performance and long-term success, supporting a product manager’s strategic responsibilities and enabling data-driven decisions about what features to prioritize and when. This includes justifying building the product and tracking it once it's launched. These tasks can benefit from tools for prioritization, market analysis, product planning, and vision management, which are critical for long-term success. This way, a product manager never loses sight of the “big picture.”
The benefits of using both:
- Covering all bases: Your team has access to everything they need to manage projects effectively, from product development to product strategy and health, by using both tools together.
- Streamlining workflows: Acclaim Products and Jira offer integrations with popular tools, including each other, to connect and automate tasks. For example, you can create Jira issues directly from Acclaim Products or track time in Acclaim Products and automatically sync that data to Jira.
- Access to data: Acclaim Products provides project analytics, while Jira provides detailed issue tracking and reporting. By combining these two data sets, you can gain a more comprehensive understanding of your team's performance and identify areas for improvement.
- Meeting different team needs: Cater to the needs of different teams within your organization and ensure everyone has access to the tools they need to be productive by using both tools together.
Together, Jira and Acclaim Products cover a wide range of needs across teams to manage a product and provide product people of all kinds with the best available tools to operate on both the business and execution levels. In other words, combining Jira and Acclaim Products supports the side of product management that sets the direction, as well as the side that makes it happen.
Using both Jira and Acclaim Products enables product managers to streamline their processes and make more informed decisions, ultimately leading to better products and happier customers. This is why it’s great that Acclaim Products integrates with Jira so you can access all of your Jira projects directly in your Acclaim Products workspace.
