Make the most out of the Lucid Cards for Jira integration

Agile meetings are great ways to plan strategically and align on progress, but nothing turns your team into zombies like watching someone type out stories and tasks in Jira. 

Importantly, because big initiatives can include hundreds of Jira tasks, it's difficult to see dependencies and how different items connect. In the past, after meetings the job of translating issues and stories from the planning board into Jira has been a large, time-consuming administrative task. 

Transform how you and your team plan out work – make it visual. Whether you're using Jira Cloud, Jira Data Center, or Jira Server, you can facilitate engaging, interactive sessions using Lucid Cards for Jira. 

On an online whiteboard teams can collaborate, create, and interact with their work together or asynchronously to spur agility, while maintaining documentation that’s never lost or misrecorded. 

With two-way sync it’s easy to keep your teams aligned. Connect the two tools to pull items directly from your Jira backlog onto your virtual Lucidspark whiteboard to visualize plans, organize work, and identify potential roadblocks. On the flip side, after brainstorming in Lucidspark, quickly turn Jira items into cards in Lucidspark that can then be added back to your Jira backlog. You can even add imported Jira issues to a Dynamic Matrix so you can easily organize your tasks and better visualize and collaborate on your Jira data.

Here’s how to make the most out of our Lucid Cards for Jira integration to see, plan, and build the future. 

Visualize your work from start to finish

Scrolling through a long backlog is overwhelming. 

Think of it like trying to distinguish between trees from the rest of the forest. Visual organization makes it easier to see how your work is connected and determine task dependencies. 

The person with the most perspective is the author of the backlog, but that’s because they built it, organized it, and maintained it. Not everyone has that perspective. The teammates completing items and turning them into valuable assets only live in the backlog as long as it takes them to accomplish their work. They need more than a list to understand how what they’re doing daily contributes to the bigger initiatives. 

Consider your organization is releasing a new project or service. It requires months worth of preparation and work along with the collaboration of multiple teams. The key is to release it strategically. It’s like loading a train and ensuring it gets to its destination on time and in the right order. 

Import planning items and issues from Jira into Lucidspark. Now a team can collaborate and manipulate items on a shared virtual whiteboard to visually plan your next initiative. Using Cards for Jira you can generate a high-level of the pace at which teams can deliver on the timeline. Now you have the flexibility to rearrange your tasks in the way that works best for your teams. 

Add imported issues to a Dynamic Matrix to view tasks in the way that makes the most sense for your team at any given moment. You can easily pivot the matrix on multiple axes to arrange tasks by assignee, status, priority, issue type, and more. Filter the matrix to narrow in on specific tasks and move cards around within the matrix—all changes will automatically be reflected on the card itself and back in Jira. 

Quickly turn your best ideas into user stories

User story mapping helps teams brainstorm a myriad of ideas and features to foster positive customer experiences. 

But all those ideas clutter your boards. The next step is to start narrowing down your ideas. Lucidspark makes it easy to arrange those ideas into actionable plans.

Customer journey maps, empathy maps, or user story maps are helpful templates to jump start brainstorming the appropriate expected user activities. Use online sticky notes to list out the necessary user task and user stories needed.

The Lucid Cards for Jira integration lets you convert your sticky notes, shapes, and more into Jira issues. Not every idea your team comes up with needs to be acted on. Save time and only convert the ones you want to move forward into Cards. The two-way sync enables your teams to organize your stories into actionable plans that update in both apps. 

Even add teammates to specific stories so everyone has clarity to who is working on which piece of the user story and improve collaboration.

Effectively plan weekly sprints  

We all know that the goal of sprint planning is to plan the upcoming two weeks workload and keep up with your backlog. But how an individual’s contributions lend to broader initiatives are often not a part of the conversation or planning process. It’s simply a part of a large list of jobs to be done. 

Instead, visualize how employees’ efforts are crucial at every stage of the workflow. Display your Jira backlog as cards right on your Lucidspark boards. 

Using the Lucid Cards for Jira integration teams can manipulate the stories, edit them, estimate them, organize them into a plan, adding new items directly from the collaboration space without having to switch to a different system or break away from the collaborative discussion. 

Apply formatting rules to Cards to easily identify potential roadblocks and bottlenecks before they become major problem areas. Even use tags and containers to prioritize Cards by importance.

Connect Cards with lines to understand the relationships between backlog items and minimize dependencies. 

Importantly, visualizing your backlog makes sprint planning easier and clearly outlines how much work teams can finish efficiently every sprint.

See the big picture

Gain transparency in your product strategy to keep your stakeholders informed with a high-level overview. 

Overarching timelines and simple roadmaps let you break down projects by sprints and creates a comprehensive picture. Share this overview with executive stakeholders for buy-in and approval and to ensure they’re updated on progress. 

Using these templates makes it easy to work cross-functionally and reach alignment at the department, team and executive level. Bring teams together to determine scope and understand important dependencies. Working visually helps your teams work better together cross-functionally and have a better understanding of everyone’s roles.

Complete a retrospective 

An important piece of agile planning is the retrospective at the end of a sprint. Holding your retrospectives on a virtual whiteboard has many advantages. It is a single source of truth to hold all of your retrospective notes.

Align on improvements and convert those stickies to Jira issues so the team can incorporate them into your next sprints to track improvements.

Visualize all of your Agile plans 

Visualizing your Agile plans helps your colleagues and stakeholders see how your team’s plan comes together. It gives your teams the flexibility to go back and make changes and iterate on the plans you’ve made, something that’s lost and can’t be done with a physical whiteboard. 

Having the entire picture in full view makes it easier for teams to see and build the future. From big room planning timelines, roadmaps, and more, the Lucid Cards for Jira integration enhances cross-team, cross-project collaboration. 

(The Lucid Cards for Jira integration is available with Jira Cloud, Jira Data Center, and Jira Server. Learn more on how to access the integration.)