As a product manager, I noticed how my team and other teams can end up rushing to meet the delivery date for a project or having to delay it after the initial planning phase. This sparked the question - why was there a disconnect between the original plan and execution?
Jira Milestones is a conceptual feature in Jira which allows users to break up large projects into Milestones, or value drops, and track it's progress against a timeline.
My target users were product and engineering as both groups need to work closely together to deliver a project. I conducted interviews with people from both roles and asked them questions to understand why they succeed at delivering some projects versus others and organized this data into insights.
The information hierarchy was developed based on my research of how product and engineering use Jira while keeping in mind Jira's design systems, meaning granting users various access points.
The initial design required a fair amount of reading with fewer visual cues. This leads to a lack of scannability therefore defeats the original goal of having Milestones in the Active Sprint for guided visibility. After testing a few iterations, I landed on a more visual design which contains a dedicated Milestone section and symbols to communicate whether a date has passed or a Milestone has been completed.
The initial design contained a popup that would appear after marking a Milestone as "complete". However, this is inconsistent with Jira's design systems of being unobtrusive, so I removed this feature.
When building the high-fidelity wireframes, I referenced Atlassian's design systems to ensure my design was consistent with their design standards. In order to speed up the wireframe process, I took screenshots of Jira's actual pages, adjusted the image's transparency, and "traced" over the image in Sketch.
The Milestone Overview feature are an extension of Jira's Roadmaps. Milestones are different than a Roadmap item in the sense that it's more integrated with the Active Sprint and Backlog, which is what engineers interact with on a daily basis.
This was my first project where I was incorporating a new feature into an existing product. I learned a lot about design systems (specifically Atlassian's), the importance of following a company's design systems, and how amazing it is for companies to establish them. Here are some other things I learned and what I would work on next.