Creating a Team-Managed Scrum Project With Jira Software

Introduction

Practical involvement offers much to learning, enabling one to get one’s hands dirty with theories learned. At the Side Hustle Product Management Bootcamp this past week, my team got dirty with Jira software to create a team-managed Scrum project. As product managers, it was an exciting journey to discover our exact relationship with cross-functional teams in product development.

Completing the Task

My team comprised Abdul-Hafis Jimoh, Adedapo Oluwatosin Janet, Albert Briggs, Chime Blessing, Chizitere Agu, David Chijioke, Ibeagi-Okezie Ijeoma, Ochigbo Mary Ene, and I. To get things rolling, we organized a team meeting to discuss our task for the week. The task was to "create a direct messaging app" with Jira software. We immediately got to understanding the software with the guide attached to the task.

After completing the guide detailing how to use Jira software, we knew it was time to create our "direct messaging app". Using the knowledge obtained from the previous week about a Product Requirement Document, we developed the necessary features for our direct messaging app (named ChatNow).

With our features in place, the next step was to use them as the material for our backlog and, subsequently, the sprints. Each team member was involved in this as we all created user stories, acceptance criteria, and tasks for the essential features to be created in the Agile environment.

For convenience, we created one 2-week sprint for each feature, ensuring to give them their unique goals, issues, and estimated completion date. With our sprints created with their respective dates, our roadmap displayed a time frame from April to June for the entire project.

Also, we created the tasks for a last feature but left them in the backlog to enable the Approver to understand that we're not looking to rush our developers. Once we completed all these steps, our task was done.

Notably, we were updating our tasks in Jira software in real-time by logging in together by 9pm and using Google Meet to communicate. It was the peak of teamwork!

Challenges

  1. Some of my team members had network glitches that took them off the meeting for some period.

  2. Since we moved as a team, it took about 2 days for us to understand how to use Jira software.

  3. We were unsure of the exact outcome the Administrator wanted from us, and we had to confirm

Note: These challenges were not weighty enough to affect any relevant things.

Retrospectives

  1. We all agreed that the task was useful and showed us a part of what product managers do in companies.

  2. We loved collaborating in real time as it allowed everyone to learn together.

The Week 2 Task was eye-opening, and I look forward to next week's task!