Both Dave Pickering from New Aspects and I will be at the Atlassian Jira users’ group in San Francisco next Thursday September 18, for those of you who’ve been following what we’re doing with Jira to automate product management for an agile dev organization. Looks like a lot of great Bay Area companies are going to be there.

And we really, really, are just about ready to publish the extensions and workflows we’ve done.

Details and registration.

Here’s the presentation that I gave this past Saturday at P-Camp, the unconference for product managers. If you’ve been following what we’re doing here with automating product management using Jira, there’s detail and screenshots in this presentation that might be interesting.

A few months ago I wrote about our effort to automate and open up product planning by implementing a process around distilling product inputs into requirements using Jira in support of an agile/scrum based development model. I’ve rarely had so much response to a post… dozens of product managers at companies large and small wrote me and commented about their own efforts along the same lines. Many asked for our specs on our Jira customizations.

We were at the beginning of this effort when I wrote that post. In the intervening 3+ months we’ve completed the first round of Jira customizations (thanks to lots of help from Dave Pickering and the team at New Aspects of Software, a fantastic consulting firm specializing in Jira - these guys do what they say they’ll do, when they say they’ll do it, for the amount of money they said they’d charge.) My tireless PM teammates have been embracing the new system and putting in the late nights to coalesce all of the feedback into common problem statements and requirements.

The PM and engineering teams are embarked on an interesting experiment here at Splunk. While we’ve always leveraged the support case system to track enhancement requests and automate some of the input end of the product management process, the real meat of product definition has happened pretty much as it does anywhere - via product requirements documents (PRDs) written by PMs and answered by a variety of technical specifications, bugs and tasks in the engineering tracking system, emails, whiteboard sessions, etc.

OK, it’s Splunk, so the PRDs and tech specs have always been on the corporate wiki so there’s some measure of collaboration. Anyone in the company could go up there and have a look at what was in progress. But it’s been pretty difficult to keep PRDs and specs fully up to date while we’ve been innovating as quickly as we have since the initial launch of the product in 2005. And it’s been impossible to give our customers and field sales engineering teams the level of transparency we want in order to get their full involvement.

Our public roadmap has to be created manually and is of necessity fairly high level and updated only every month or so. The other PMs and I are constantly fielding a barrage of “what’s the status of this feature?” questions.

I’m the speaker tomorrow for a regular series of webinars called “The Product Management View.” I’ll be talking about leveraging support in product management - which is what we do here.

Noon eastern.

Register here. Warning: they only support Windows for these webinars. (Aaargh.) You can watch archived webinars via Flash though.