Hi everyone! I’m the Chief Product Officer at a remote company with about 100 employees. We’ve been using Jira and Confluence for roughly a decade now. Initially everything worked great when we just had Product and IT teams sharing one board, later expanding to multiple boards per product using Jira Software with Scrum methodology.
However, as our organization expanded and we added Marketing, Sales, and other departments, each team ended up with their own separate Jira project. This created challenges for managing work that spans multiple teams.
Our current workaround involves creating dedicated projects for high-level Initiatives and another for Scope items (which function as epics). Teams then link their individual tasks to these scope items using parent relationships. We also rely on a third-party addon called Sheets to generate comprehensive reports from this complex structure.
Honestly, this approach is quite cumbersome. We need specific link types to connect Initiatives with Scope items since epic-to-parent connections require premium licensing. The whole system feels bloated and makes it challenging to train new team members.
We experimented with Advanced Roadmaps but found the interface too overwhelming and abandoned it quickly. Atlassian Home seemed promising initially, but its Projects feature doesn’t support linking multiple Jira items, so it doesn’t address our core issue.
I’m reaching out to this community for advice on how you handle similar challenges in your organizations. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated as I’m actively seeking better solutions.
I’ll be honest, the frustration has reached a point where I’m considering developing a custom solution myself!
you’re definitely overthinking this. we had the same headaches and went back to basics - one main project for cross-team stuff, everything else stays where it is. skip the fancy linking and just use tags and mentions. that sheets addon is probably costing more than it’s worth. sometimes the boring solution actually works best.
This exact same thing happened at my previous company (similar size). We got stuck in the same mess with too many projects and crazy linking everywhere. What saved us? We switched from team-based projects to domain-based ones. Instead of separate Marketing, Sales, IT projects, we created Customer Acquisition, Product Development, and Operations projects. Teams naturally collaborated within each domain, which killed most of the linking headaches since everyone working on related stuff shared the same space. We kept team-specific work in their original projects but moved all cross-functional stuff into these domain projects. Here’s the thing - your org structure doesn’t have to match your Jira structure. Training time dropped like crazy and we dumped most of our reporting addons since native dashboards handled everything. Advanced Roadmaps actually worked once we simplified the project setup.
Been there. We massively simplified by cutting down to fewer projects and using components smarter instead of separate projects per team. Here’s what we learned: cross-team coordination doesn’t need separate project structures - you need better tagging and filtering. We created one “Cross-Team” project for multi-department stuff, then used issue linking (not parent-child) to connect back to team work. Simple labeling convention worked way better than complex reporting. That third-party addon dependency? Red flag. We got burned by vendor lock-in during renewals. The fanciest setup isn’t always the best one - especially when onboarding new people becomes a nightmare. Before building custom solutions, ask yourself: is this complexity solving real problems or just creating new headaches?