Navigating a new market: JIRA core, for business teams
Adapting a tool built for software developers to serve HR, marketing, legal, and ops teams.
Adapting a tool built for software developers to serve HR, marketing, legal, and ops teams.
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Designer on the Jira Core product team, working on the challenge of adapting a tool built for software development to serve HR, marketing, legal, and operations teams.
Jira was synonymous with software development. But Atlassian saw an opportunity to bring its project management capabilities to business teams who had no relationship with agile methodology, sprint planning, or bug tracking. Jira Core was the vehicle for that expansion.
The design challenge was fundamental: what does Jira look like when you strip away every assumption about its users being technical? The terminology, the workflows, the default configurations, the onboarding — everything needed rethinking for people who'd never seen a sprint board and didn't want to.
This wasn't a reskin. It was a question of product-market fit expressed through design decisions. What templates should exist? What should the default workflow look like for an HR onboarding process vs. a marketing campaign? How do you make Jira approachable without removing the power that makes it Jira?
This project was early in my career at Atlassian and shaped how I think about the tension between platform flexibility and domain-specific simplicity — a tension I'd navigate for the next decade.
