5 ways teams use Jira and Coda together
From dashboards to Gantt charts to tracking progress toward milestones, teams connect Jira and Coda to better manage their work.
Harshita Yerramreddy
Product Manager at Coda
5 ways teams use Jira and Coda together
By Harshita Yerramreddy
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Productivity · 5 min read
1. Build dashboards to track Jira issues.
Creating dashboards in Jira can be challenging, especially for issues that span more than one project. In fact, the ability to view issues from multiple projects in a single location is one of Jira’s most upvoted feature requests. Luckily, you don’t have to wait for Jira to release that functionality. Our Jira Pack lets you pull all of your issues and projects into Coda, and our Jira dashboard template makes it simple to organize them by project, assignee, status, priority, and more. Now your team only needs to visit one doc to visualize everything that’s on their plate, and leadership can view project status and progress at a glance. For product teams, the Jira pack removes the silo between static Jira task lists and your evolving roadmap. Consolidate issues across product-related projects into a single dashboard, then store that information alongside your other most-used team artifacts to keep everyone on the same page (literally).“Creating custom charts and visualizations across Jira projects usually requires paying for costly add-ons from third parties in the Atlassian marketplace. Native charting in Coda gives you all the custom charts you’ll need to view burndown and burn-up metrics across multiple Jira projects.”
Al Chen
Solutions Architect at Coda
2. Visualize Jira issues with Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and more.
Long lists of Jira tasks are hard to parse and summarize, which is why so many Jira users rely on visual representations instead. Examples include Gantt charts, Kanban views, timelines, pie charts, line graphs, and other graphical representations of your team’s to-do list. In Coda, your Jira data visualization options are nearly endless and fully customizable to your team’s priorities and preferences. Report on everything from progress and project status to recent team successes with nice-to-look-at, easy-to-digest graphics. Here at Coda, our product managers on multiple teams visualize Jira data during their quarterly retrospectives. Using this handy template, they track issues across the quarter, push updates to Jira tasks directly from Coda, identify items that need to roll into the next one, call out things to start, stop, and continue, and add takeaways and kudos.3. Track progress toward objectives and milestones.
If your team tracks objectives and milestones in a spreadsheet or doc but all of their issues are being tracked in Jira, something is bound to fall through the cracks. With Coda, however, you can view and manage your Jira issues in the same workspace where you measure progress toward your goals. By creating this single source of truth, you eliminate the need for copy-pasting between tools and constant tab-switching. With two-way sync, any Jira data you update in Coda is updated in Jira as well, and vice versa. You’ll never have to worry whether data in one platform matches that in the other.- A brief at the top of the page.
- Next, a table of milestones.
- Lastly, a live dashboard of Jira progress as engineers shipped code.
4. Speed up the issue submission process.
Most likely, Jira is your team’s go-to platform for entering bugs, issues, requests, tasks, and just about everything else. To organize all of these many submissions and ensure nothing gets ignored or forgotten, simply create a Coda template to capture all critical information. With Coda’s Jira Pack, all of that data is captured and flows to the correct team/tracker in Jira. Coda’s own IT team uses this system to make it easy for anyone across the company to submit requests. When a Codan fills out the form, it creates an issue directly within Jira that can be tracked and resolved without the need for additional plugins.“Pulling data from Jira into Coda allows you to do something nothing else on the market does for Jira—have a single surface that can chart out trends, drill into insights, and take actions or make changes, all in the same place, without clicking out to multiple links.”
Khoi Pham
Head of IT at Coda
5. Improve team standups with Jira data.
At Coda, our product teams run weekly standups. If your team does the same, you might find our template helpful. We connect Jira data directly into our standup ritual so that our team can quickly identify what needs to be tackled, ask questions, and track the answers. Updates made in Coda to the Jira tickets automatically sync with Jira, so that the data is updated—and accurate—everywhere. “Any engineering team that manages their tasks in Jira knows that keeping their issues up to date is key to making the most of the tool. Burndowns, swim lanes, and sprint management are no use if you don’t have the latest on where each issue stands,” says Noah Silverstein, Solutions Lead at Coda. “Unfortunately, this often leads a PM to become the gardener, regularly monitoring PR progress, making sure issues have been closed appropriately, and generally micromanaging their team—which neither the PM nor the engineers like at all.” The root of this problem is that Jira is the team’s system of record but not where they actually do their work. Standups, for example, usually happen in a Confluence page or a Google Doc. “What many PMs long for is a way to bring those two systems together—a single place to keep Jira up to date while going through their regular rituals. Unfortunately, though you can bring issues into a Confluence page, you cannot edit them without separately opening Jira—and Atlassian has said this is something they will not fix. The friction may seem small, but it’s enough that these issues often don’t get updated at all,” says Noah. “Running your standups in Coda completely breaks down this barrier by letting you sync your Jira issues and edit them inline during your team’s standup. And when your data stays up to date, everything runs smoothly. You can properly scope projects, predict how far burndowns will get, assign new tasks by capacity, and everything else that relies on accurate data in Jira.”Easily connect Jira and Coda.
By combining Jira and Coda, your product team gets the best of both worlds. You can take advantage of Jira’s extensive project and issue management functionality while also leveraging Coda’s customizable and visually appealing docs to create a true single source of truth. Learn more about the logistics of the Jira Pack, including information about permissions and licenses, and how to sync, update, and create Jira issues from Coda. When you’re ready to visualize your project timelines, create easy-to-digest dashboards, and streamline request submissions, get the Jira Pack.Related posts
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