Are you letting Jira manage you?
Hey there!
Jira is not a beloved word in game and software development.
It promises clarity, collaboration, visibility, and data. What it often provides is confusion, wasted time, nitpicking, and cynicism.
While I do think Jira is partially to blame for this, I also think how we RELATE to Jira (and other systems like it), is the real problem.
If you’ve ever felt trapped by Jira, here’s the big picture frame for escaping.
Escaping The Process Inversion
When Jira stops serving the work and the work starts serving Jira, you get process inversion. You see it when:
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Questions start with “what’s in Jira?” or “where’s the ticket?” not “what would make the biggest difference?”
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Teams optimize for ticket flow instead of player impact
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Leaders start seeing dashboards and reports as “true” and think they can make big decisions based off of “analyzing” them
The tool has become the boss. Your outcomes pay the price.
Flip it back - Keep the tools where they belong
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Tickets should CAUSE conversation, not REMOVE them
Every time you see someone forcing things in Jira and attempting to use tickets to avoid having alignment conversations, recognize that that is an anti-pattern. I get it, people want to be efficient and don’t want to have to discuss everything, but the reality is we just don’t communicate that effectively via ticketing systems. We align through conversation.
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Success is about the AUDIENCE, not the ticketing system
Imagine you started daily syncs with a question: “What’s the most important player-facing change we can ship?” What would you talk about? Would it be what you talk about right now, or would it change everything?
If it WOULD change everything, recognize that you’re probably focusing your team on the wrong things. You’ve probably replaced understanding what success looks like for the player, with understanding what success looks like in “Jira.”
Tickets are a single data point. The state of the game is what matters.
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Avoid using ticket movement to judge performance
Tickets look different between teams. They are of different sizes, types, and difficulties. Whenever I see organizations trying to understand team (and especially individual) performance purely through Jira (or their ticketing system of choice) I know something is wrong.
Not only will this provide you an incorrect picture of how your organization is performing, it will also cause a ton of antipattern cultural responses as people start manipulating their ticketing system so they don’t get in trouble.
A quick diagnostic
If leaders in your organization tend to prefer to look at Jira reporting and dashboards rather than talking to people doing work to understand what’s going on, you’ve got a problem.
Fortunately, it is solvable. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t realize the problem exists.
To help you avoid becoming a slave to your tools, we dig into Jira and game dev here:
Why Jira Hurts Game Studios on Building Better Games
In the episode you’ll learn:
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How process inversion starts from a desire for “visibility”
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Why your team’s data becomes less useful the more you rely on it
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Practical trims to make Jira serve collaboration, not replace it
Make Jira a servant. Not the master.
Cheers!
Ben C.
P.S.
If you’re a leader in game dev who feels stuck, I want to help. I’ve recently launched the Game Dev Leadership Accelerator to help leaders like you navigate their org, position themselves to have a positive impact, and ultimately help their teams and games succeed. If that’s of interest, sign up to learn more here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfWzvP4Mp3511t8btuSBkaGJta3-rss0eNp7YuXYa6J7zwBkA/viewform
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