Building a shared understanding is the key to success of any software team. From concept to launch, I'll share the ways to maximize efforts and build tribal knowledge throughout the entire software development process for every type of project.
Learn from the teams who use Confluence and Jira Software every day to ideate, discover, strategize, define problems and requirements, communicate to stakeholders, and more!
Concept to Launch: The Ultimate Confluence Guide for Software Teams
1. SHERIF MANSOUR | PRODUCT GUY | @SHERIFMANSOUR
Concept to Launch: The Ultimate Guide to
Confluence for Software Teams
2. Confluence used for a lot of things
Community
Knowledgeâ¨
base
Socialâ¨
intranet
Project
planning
Documentation
FINANCE
HR
EXECUTIVE
RECRUITMENT
IT
LEGAL
SOFTWARE
âŚ
3. Inception Planning Build Tailor
Confluence for software teams
Cloud and Server
Out-of-the-box features
Customized features
Software best practices applied in Confluence
4. Inception
Capture ideas
Capture ideas form anywhere: Blogs, Confluence Questions, âShared Linksâ template.
Plan surveys
Collaborate on survey questions and share outcomes.
Share interviews
Turn customer research into action.
Capture personas
Build a shared understanding of your users.
5. Inception / Customer interviews
WHY?
CUSTOMERâ¨
INTERVIEWS
Interviews Taking lots of notes
Central repository:â¨
Build on shared knowledge
Organize & find
Identify trends
and opportunities
Turn insights â¨
into action
6. Inception / Customer interviews
Effective interview communication
⢠Communicate observations: â¨
Absolute minimum: Communicate what
youâve seen. â¨
⢠Interpret problems: â¨
Group behaviors in overarching problem
statements.â¨
⢠Connect opportunities: â¨
What opportunities exist which may solve
this problem?
INTERVIEW PYRAMIDâ¨
FRAMEWORK
The customer interview pyramid
Connectâ¨
opportunities
Interpret problems
Communicate observations
12. Create from template
Weâve already created our own
âcustomer interviewâ template for this
space. The âcreate from templateâ
macro makes it easy for users to create
more interviews.
13.
14. Labels List
Lists all labels alphabetically. If
youâre labelling customer interview
pages with related topics, this makes
it easy to find all interviews for a
particular topic.
16. Inception / Interviews
⢠Background and company infoâ¨
Provide context for your team.
For each problem youâve observed:
⢠Problemâ¨
Start with a problem statement.
⢠Observationsâ¨
Describe the observations which lead you to conclude that
problem.â¨
⢠Opportunities â¨
Where might we go from here?
⢠#protips
⢠@mention team members
⢠Link to related Jira issues for traceability
⢠Label interview with related topics
Customer Interview Page Template
Customer Interview Space Template
⢠Live search macroâ¨
Make it easy to find interviews,â¨
⢠Create from template macroâ¨
Add a button to easily create more interviews and
follow the framework.â¨
⢠Labels list macroâ¨
Makes finding all interviews by topic easy.
17. Inception / Customer interviews
⢠Customer interview pyramid â¨
Encourage your team to focus on problems and
opportunities.â¨
⢠Space templateâ¨
Quickly find recent interviews, by topic, date or search.
Launchpad to create new interviews.â¨
⢠Page template â¨
Easy way to encourage problem-thinking instead of
simply documenting observations.
TURN INSIGHTS INTO ACTION
19. Inception / Personas
⢠Trends â¨
Research leads to identifying trends for the
kinds of users (archetypes) which use your
software.â¨
⢠Personasâ¨
Articulating archetypes is done by creating
personas.
20. Inception / Personas
WHY?
â¨
⢠Shared understanding of your usersâ¨
Develop a vocabulary for who youâre building for what how
they think.â¨
⢠Focus problem, solution and roadmapâ¨
Make better decisions by providing clarity around target
customer.
⢠Improve marketingâ¨
Communicating value is much easier if weâre clear about who
weâre building for.
25. Research / Personas
Persona Page Template
⢠Photo & memorable quoteâ¨
Quotes and pictures are memorable. â¨
⢠âAttitude slidersââ¨
E.g. âAppetite for⌠Patience forâŚâ
⢠Aboutâ¨
Goals, motivations, what does âgood/bad dayâ look like for
this persona?â¨
⢠Behaviors â¨
Activities which describe their attributes. E.g âringleaderâ.
⢠Questionsâ¨
For your team to think about when designing a solution for
this persona.
⢠Recent interviewsâ¨
Use the âcontent by labelâ macro to identify recent interviews
for this persona.
Persona Space Template
⢠Introduce personasâ¨
What are they? Where can I learn more? Who can I
speak to?â¨
⢠Snapshot of each personaâ¨
Memorable quote, high-level overview of the
persona. Link to detailed persona page. â¨
⢠Recent interviewsâ¨
Use the âcontent by labelâ macro to display recent
interviews about any of these personas.
26. Inception / Personas
⢠Personas â¨
A valuable tool to help your team build a shared understanding of
your customers. â¨
⢠Space templateâ¨
Get an overview of your personas and find recent interviews.
Onboard new team members quickly.â¨
⢠Page template â¨
Understand how your persona behaves. what your persona
thinks, feels and does.â¨
â¨
đĄComing up: Reference your persona when planning
requirements.
UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMERS
27. Inception
Capture ideas
Capture ideas form anywhere: Blogs, Confluence Questions, âShared Linksâ template.
Plan surveys
Collaborate on survey questions and share outcomes.
Share interviews
Turn customer research into action.
Capture personas
Build a shared understanding of your users.
29. Planning workshops and offsites
Brainstorm on goals, agenda & communicate outcomes for group work.
Planning
Communicating strategy
Articulate and gather feedback on strategy.
High-level roadmapping
Paint a plan for your team.
Team scheduling
Plan the availability of your team, projects, rosters and other events.
Aligning on requirements
Break down that big problem into small pieces.
30. Planning / High-level roadmapping
WHY?
â¨
⢠Align stakeholders â¨
High-level plants help communicate top down as well as to
adjacent or dependent teams that might be planning based off
your work.
⢠Confidence in direction â¨
Teams see where youâre going and roughly when.
⢠Connect for details â¨
Keep it high-level. Give yourself agility. Link to details as needed.
32. Planning / Roadmap Communication
Roadmap Macro
⢠Lanesâ¨
Help communicate a theme of workâ¨
⢠Barsâ¨
Great for an actual work item. Could be a project, epic or
set of tasks you need to get done. Link bars to other
pages, Jira issues to Trello cards for detail. â¨
⢠Markersâ¨
Great for milestones. Could be an event, a release date or
a target date.
⢠#protips
⢠Less about accuracy, more about high-level comms
⢠You can use them anywhere e.g. team homepages,
project landing pages, large project plans etcâŚ
33.
34.
35.
36. Planning / High-level roadmapping
ALIGN YOUR TEAM
â¨
⢠Watch: The art of building a roadmap â¨
Roadmaps come in all shapes and sizes. Donât get fixated on
one method, watch bit.ly/buildingroadmaps.â¨
⢠Roadmap macro â¨
Visualise your direction, link to details as needed.â¨
⢠Embed in strategy or planning pages â¨
Use standalone or embed in high-level planning pages for your
project.
37. Planning / Team scheduling
WHY?
â¨
⢠Release planning != roadmap planningâ¨
Communicating high-level roadmaps is different to
understanding whatâs shipping and when.
⢠Understand where your team is atâ¨
Teams see where youâre going and roughly when.
⢠Bring in other contextsâ¨
Your team doesnât work in insolation. Take into consideration all
the other events happening in your team or organisation.
43. Planning / Team scheduling
ALIGN YOUR TEAM
â¨
⢠Confluence Team Calendarsâ¨
Checkout the app in the Marketplace, for Cloud and Server.
⢠Plan teams and projectsâ¨
Integrate with Jira releases, sprints or issue dates. Overlay your
teams leave and travel plans.
⢠Add custom events â¨
Create custom events for anything else your team does, link to
pages for more detail.
44. Planning / Requirements
WHY?
â¨
⢠Align stakeholders â¨
High-level plants help communicate top down as well as to
adjacent or dependent teams that might be planning based off
your work.
⢠Confidence in direction â¨
Teams see where youâre going and roughly when.
⢠Connect for details â¨
Keep it high-level. Give yourself agility. Link to details as needed.
60. Planning / Requirements
GET ON THE SAME PAGE
â¨
⢠Requirements template â¨
Modify it to fit your needs
⢠Embed rich content, link to context â¨
Work with design and other teams to embed rich content to
provide more context. Link to related personas, interviews for
background.â¨
⢠Move from requirements to backlogâ¨
With automatic Jira issue creation
⢠#protips
⢠Collaborate on images and files
⢠You can link from Jira issues back to Confluence
⢠Tailor the template to meet your needs.
61. Planning
Planning workshops and offsites
Brainstorm on goals, agenda & communicate outcomes for group work.
Communicating strategy
Articulate and gather feedback on strategy.
High-level roadmapping
Paint a plan for your team.
Team scheduling
Plan the availability of your team, projects, rosters and other events.
Aligning on requirements
Break down that big problem into small pieces.
64. Meetings
Ad-hoc, regular , retrospectives, project statusâŚ
Build
Decision making
Move work forward by thinking collaborating on tough decisions.
Progress reporting
Confluence can be your window into Jira.
65. Build / Decisions
WHY?
â¨
⢠Confidence in decisions â¨
Create, discuss, explore different options for decisions related to
your project or team.
⢠Build in shared knowledgeâ¨
Help new members understand how a decision came to be with
context on each decision.
⢠Align stakeholders â¨
Provide clarity on the big decisions which need to be made and
who is responsible for each one.
71. Build / Decisions
MAKE BETTER DECISIONS
â¨
⢠Confluence Decisions Templateâ¨
Out-of-the-box, modeled on the DACI framework. Focus on on
the bigger, hard-to-reverse decisions.
⢠Work together to explore options â¨
Collaborate, comment, edit with teams to ensure youâve
explored effective ways to make the decision.
⢠Customize to fit your needsâ¨
Modify the decisions template at a space or site-level to fit your
team or company process.
72. Build / Progress Reporting
WHY?
â¨
⢠Updates with contextâ¨
Reporting on your projects form Jira in Confluence allows you to
provide commentary alongside your update.
⢠Collaborateâ¨
Reporting for Jira in Confluence allows your teams to have a
discussion around the updates and get on the same page.
⢠Reach all teamsâ¨
Not all your teams might be using Jira. Communicate progress
to other departments in Confluence.
74. Build / Progress Reporting
TEMPLATES TO GET YOU STARTED
Jira Report
Templates
â¨
⢠Change logâ¨
Keep a log of your teams progress or communicate deliverables.
Generate a static or dynamic list of JIRA issues from a saved
search, JIRA URL or JQL query.
⢠Status Reportâ¨
Visually communicate the overall progress of your project with
your stakeholders. Generate charts from a saved search, JIRA
URL or JQL query.
81. Build / Progress Reporting
JIRA REPORTING ⤠CONFLUENCE
Jira Report
Templates
â¨
⢠Change log and status reports â¨
Bootstrap snapshot or dynamic charting from the Jira
⢠Jira issues macro â¨
Insert single issues, a count of issues, table of issues, customize
your columns and charts!â¨
⢠#protipsâ¨
You can copy-paste a Jira issue filter, issue or search result to
automatically display in Confluence!
82. Build
Meetings
Ad-hoc, regular , retrospectives, project statusâŚ
Decision making
Move work forward by thinking collaborating on tough decisions.
Progress reporting
Confluence can be your window into Jira.
84. Tailor / Confluence to fit your software team
Modify â¨
out-of-the-box
E.g. Requirements, DecisionsâŚ
Create â¨
new
E.g. Personas, InterviewsâŚ
NEW
85. Tailor / Your building blocks
1. Page template
Your own, or modify an existing one.
Space Settings > Content Tools
2. Page properties macro
Add page metadata you want to captureâ¨
and report on. Can be anything! (Macros, links, mentionsâŚ)
3. Add label(s)
As part of your page template to allow you to report on
pages for your label.
CREATE/MODIFY YOUR TEMPLATE
@
STATUS
@
86. Tailor / Your building blocks
1. Create page
Your own, or modify an existing one. â¨
E.g. Decision log, Customer interview homeâŚ
2. Page properties report macro
Use the report macro to decide what rows you want to report on.â¨
Select the label name youâve picked for your page.
3. âCreate from templateâ macro
If you want to add a button that âadds anotherâ of your template,
Checkout the create from template macro.
CREATE/MODIFY YOUR REPORT PAGE
CREATE ANOTHERâŚ
STATUS
STATUS
STATUS
STATUS
STATUS
@
@
@
@
@