As a program manager, you’re constantly juggling competing priorities, navigating organizational complexity, and trying to keep everyone moving in the same direction. You’re the connective tissue between leadership’s strategic vision and the day-to-day execution across multiple teams. But without the right tools, this balancing act can quickly become overwhelming.
The challenges are all too familiar: scattered information across different systems, inconsistent prioritization processes, unclear or outdated roadmaps, and the constant struggle to maintain alignment as plans inevitably change. When leadership asks for updates, you’re scrambling to gather accurate information from across teams. And what makes it worse – managing this all across multiple interdependent teams.
Jira Product Discovery was designed to help you drive better transparency, alignment, and decision-making. Here are four ways Jira Product Discovery can support better cross-functional collaboration and coordination.
1. Portfolio intake and prioritization
When working across multiple teams, program managers often struggle to create a standardized intake process, leading to siloed prioritization and disconnected decision-making. Without a unified approach, high impact initiatives may get delayed and resources may be misallocated.
Jira Product Discovery enables program managers to standardize how initiatives and projects enter the pipeline across all teams for review.
- Use global fields to enforce the same terminology and values across different discovery projects
- Establish consistent evaluation criteria and scoring methods by creating fields like Impact and Effort ratings for each team to use (make these global fields!)
- If you’re using Jira Product Discovery Premium, pull each team’s intake list into a unified view via the Roadmaps feature, and “Group by” project to easily organize and scan the list
With this setup leadership can objectively assess initiatives across the entire program, ensuring the highest-impact work receives appropriate resources regardless of which team proposed it.
2. Leadership visibility into portfolio progress
When teams track progress in different tools or formats, it creates inconsistencies and makes it harder to pull together clear, concise updates for leadership. Without a unified view, program managers spend more time chasing down information, and leaders struggle to spot roadblocks or make timely decisions.
Customizable, cross-project views in Jira Product Discovery Premium can quickly bring a portfolio roadmap together in minutes to give leadership real-time visibility into delivery progress across multiple teams, and allow them to provide quick input.
- Use a board view to organize projects based on their status and easily identify what is off track and needs attention
- Set up global fields to standardize information like project stage, release type, and target quarter
- Link ideas on your roadmap to Jira work items and add the delivery progress field to show real-time progress updates
And a bonus – teams still maintain autonomy in their own dedicated project to prioritize and plan their roadmap.
3. Product management and go-to-market alignment
Driving cross-functional alignment is one of the most critical—and challenging—responsibilities of a program manager. And keeping product and go-to-market teams in sync is no easy task, especially as timelines shift and impact downstream GTM plans. Without a constantly updated roadmap, communication breaks down, marketing efforts lag, and product launches risk falling flat (or missed altogether).
In Jira Product Discovery, roadmaps integrate with Jira work items, so if projects get delayed, your source of truth automatically reflects the latest (without program management having to chase down and follow-up). And while roadmaps primarily communicate progress, the more context the better.
- Add fields for launch tier, or links to prototypes and one pagers to understand scope at a glance
- Include a launch date and announce date to easily plan comms and support readiness
- Group by a “release type” field to show which initiatives are GA, pilot, or private beta
With real-time visibility, GTM teams can plan ahead, and program managers can coordinate smoother handoffs between teams and pre-launch activities.
To integrate your roadmaps into existing processes, you can embed them into a Confluence page – in this example a pre-existing ‘GTM product release hub’ – that team members are already using. And it will still reflect any changes as they happen in Jira Product Discovery.
4. Source of truth roadmap for individual teams
Our main focus has been helping facilitate better cross-functional ways of working, but even when focused on a single team, it’s a struggle to maintain an accurate, up-to-date roadmap that reflects current priorities and progress. Without this foundation, alignment within teams falters, and the ripple effects can undermine program-wide coordination.
Team-specific views in Jira Product Discovery that reflect real-time priorities ensure everyone understands what they’re working on, why it matters, and how it fits into the broader program context.
- Set up a dedicated team project for individual team prioritization and roadmapping
- Organize your roadmap into columns for quarter or time horizons like Now, Next, Later
- Toggle different fields to add information to idea cards, like a prioritization score, goals, or assigned squad
By maintaining clear roadmaps at the team level, program managers create the essential building blocks for broader alignment, even when coordinating diverse work-streams across the organization.
By leveraging these four use cases within Jira Product Discovery, program managers can transform how cross-functional teams collaborate, stay in lockstep, and deliver value together. Give Jira Product Discovery a try for free here.