Building a shared understanding is the key to success of any software team. From concept to launch, I'll share the ways to maximize efforts and build tribal knowledge throughout the entire software development process for every type of project. Learn from the teams who use Confluence and Jira Software every day to ideate, discover, strategize, define problems and requirements, communicate to stakeholders, and more!

1. SHERIF MANSOUR | PRODUCT GUY | @SHERIFMANSOUR
Concept to Launch: The Ultimate Guide to
Confluence for Software Teams

2. Confluence used for a lot of things
Community
Knowledge
base
Social
intranet
Project
planning
Documentation
FINANCE
HR
EXECUTIVE
RECRUITMENT
IT
LEGAL
SOFTWARE
…

3. Inception Planning Build Tailor
Confluence for software teams
Cloud and Server
Out-of-the-box features
Customized features
Software best practices applied in Confluence

4. Inception
Capture ideas
Capture ideas form anywhere: Blogs, Confluence Questions, “Shared Links” template.
Plan surveys
Collaborate on survey questions and share outcomes.
Share interviews
Turn customer research into action.
Capture personas
Build a shared understanding of your users.

5. Inception / Customer interviews
WHY?
CUSTOMER
INTERVIEWS
Interviews Taking lots of notes
Central repository:
Build on shared knowledge
Organize & find
Identify trends
and opportunities
Turn insights
into action

6. Inception / Customer interviews
Effective interview communication
• Communicate observations:
Absolute minimum: Communicate what
you’ve seen.
• Interpret problems:
Group behaviors in overarching problem
statements.
• Connect opportunities:
What opportunities exist which may solve
this problem?
INTERVIEW PYRAMID
FRAMEWORK
The customer interview pyramid
Connect
opportunities
Interpret problems
Communicate observations

11. Live Search
Filtered for all content in
the customer interviews
space

12. Create from template
We’ve already created our own
“customer interview” template for this
space. The “create from template”
macro makes it easy for users to create
more interviews.

14. Labels List
Lists all labels alphabetically. If
you’re labelling customer interview
pages with related topics, this makes
it easy to find all interviews for a
particular topic.

15. Content by label
Browse recent interviews with the
`cusotmer-interview` label

16. Inception / Interviews
• Background and company info
Provide context for your team.
For each problem you’ve observed:
• Problem
Start with a problem statement.
• Observations
Describe the observations which lead you to conclude that
problem.
• Opportunities
Where might we go from here?
• #protips
• @mention team members
• Link to related Jira issues for traceability
• Label interview with related topics
Customer Interview Page Template
Customer Interview Space Template
• Live search macro
Make it easy to find interviews,
• Create from template macro
Add a button to easily create more interviews and
follow the framework.
• Labels list macro
Makes finding all interviews by topic easy.

17. Inception / Customer interviews
• Customer interview pyramid
Encourage your team to focus on problems and
opportunities.
• Space template
Quickly find recent interviews, by topic, date or search.
Launchpad to create new interviews.
• Page template
Easy way to encourage problem-thinking instead of
simply documenting observations.
TURN INSIGHTS INTO ACTION

18. Inception / Personas
WHY?
CUSTOMER
INTERVIEWS
Interviews Taking lots of notes
Central repository:
Build on shared knowledge
Organize & find
Identify trends
and opportunities
Turn insights
into action

19. Inception / Personas
• Trends
Research leads to identifying trends for the
kinds of users (archetypes) which use your
software.
• Personas
Articulating archetypes is done by creating
personas.

20. Inception / Personas
WHY?
• Shared understanding of your users
Develop a vocabulary for who you’re building for what how
they think.
• Focus problem, solution and roadmap
Make better decisions by providing clarity around target
customer.
• Improve marketing
Communicating value is much easier if we’re clear about who
we’re building for.

21. Inception / Personas

25. Research / Personas
Persona Page Template
• Photo & memorable quote
Quotes and pictures are memorable.
• “Attitude sliders”
E.g. “Appetite for… Patience for…”
• About
Goals, motivations, what does “good/bad day” look like for
this persona?
• Behaviors
Activities which describe their attributes. E.g “ringleader”.
• Questions
For your team to think about when designing a solution for
this persona.
• Recent interviews
Use the “content by label” macro to identify recent interviews
for this persona.
Persona Space Template
• Introduce personas
What are they? Where can I learn more? Who can I
speak to?
• Snapshot of each persona
Memorable quote, high-level overview of the
persona. Link to detailed persona page.
• Recent interviews
Use the “content by label” macro to display recent
interviews about any of these personas.

26. Inception / Personas
• Personas
A valuable tool to help your team build a shared understanding of
your customers.
• Space template
Get an overview of your personas and find recent interviews.
Onboard new team members quickly.
• Page template
Understand how your persona behaves. what your persona
thinks, feels and does.
💡Coming up: Reference your persona when planning
requirements.
UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMERS

27. Inception
Capture ideas
Capture ideas form anywhere: Blogs, Confluence Questions, “Shared Links” template.
Plan surveys
Collaborate on survey questions and share outcomes.
Share interviews
Turn customer research into action.
Capture personas
Build a shared understanding of your users.

28. Inception Planning Build Tailor
Confluence for software teams

29. Planning workshops and offsites
Brainstorm on goals, agenda & communicate outcomes for group work.
Planning
Communicating strategy
Articulate and gather feedback on strategy.
High-level roadmapping
Paint a plan for your team.
Team scheduling
Plan the availability of your team, projects, rosters and other events.
Aligning on requirements
Break down that big problem into small pieces.

30. Planning / High-level roadmapping
WHY?
• Align stakeholders
High-level plants help communicate top down as well as to
adjacent or dependent teams that might be planning based off
your work.
• Confidence in direction
Teams see where you’re going and roughly when.
• Connect for details
Keep it high-level. Give yourself agility. Link to details as needed.

31. bit.ly/buildingroadmaps
“The art of building a roadmap”
TALK

32. Planning / Roadmap Communication
Roadmap Macro
• Lanes
Help communicate a theme of work
• Bars
Great for an actual work item. Could be a project, epic or
set of tasks you need to get done. Link bars to other
pages, Jira issues to Trello cards for detail.
• Markers
Great for milestones. Could be an event, a release date or
a target date.
• #protips
• Less about accuracy, more about high-level comms
• You can use them anywhere e.g. team homepages,
project landing pages, large project plans etc…

36. Planning / High-level roadmapping
ALIGN YOUR TEAM
• Watch: The art of building a roadmap
Roadmaps come in all shapes and sizes. Don’t get fixated on
one method, watch bit.ly/buildingroadmaps.
• Roadmap macro
Visualise your direction, link to details as needed.
• Embed in strategy or planning pages
Use standalone or embed in high-level planning pages for your
project.

37. Planning / Team scheduling
WHY?
• Release planning != roadmap planning
Communicating high-level roadmaps is different to
understanding what’s shipping and when.
• Understand where your team is at
Teams see where you’re going and roughly when.
• Bring in other contexts
Your team doesn’t work in insolation. Take into consideration all
the other events happening in your team or organisation.

38. Planning / Team scheduling
WHY?
Team Calendars

40. Leave or travel
Communicate team
availability with leave or travel
plans

41. Align on projects
Augment your team calendar with
Jira releases, sprints or issue dates.
Drag-and-drop to re-schedule from
Confluence.

42. Capture any other
event
Create custom events for anything
else - training, outages, celebrations
or team social events.

43. Planning / Team scheduling
ALIGN YOUR TEAM
• Confluence Team Calendars
Checkout the app in the Marketplace, for Cloud and Server.
• Plan teams and projects
Integrate with Jira releases, sprints or issue dates. Overlay your
teams leave and travel plans.
• Add custom events
Create custom events for anything else your team does, link to
pages for more detail.

44. Planning / Requirements
WHY?
• Align stakeholders
High-level plants help communicate top down as well as to
adjacent or dependent teams that might be planning based off
your work.
• Confidence in direction
Teams see where you’re going and roughly when.
• Connect for details
Keep it high-level. Give yourself agility. Link to details as needed.

45. bit.ly/DontAlwaysWriteRequirements
⚠ Try to avoid writing requirements!
TALK

47. Page Properties Macro
Key information about this document.
Used for reporting.

48. Page Properties Macro
Key information about this document.
Used for reporting.
Link for context
To your personas or customer
interviews.

53. marketplace.atlassian.com
Atlassian Marketplace
CHECKOUT
Lots of apps to help your team get aligned: Diagraming, charting, mockups…

58. Automatic traceability
Linking goes both ways.

60. Planning / Requirements
GET ON THE SAME PAGE
• Requirements template
Modify it to fit your needs
• Embed rich content, link to context
Work with design and other teams to embed rich content to
provide more context. Link to related personas, interviews for
background.
• Move from requirements to backlog
With automatic Jira issue creation
• #protips
• Collaborate on images and files
• You can link from Jira issues back to Confluence
• Tailor the template to meet your needs.

61. Planning
Planning workshops and offsites
Brainstorm on goals, agenda & communicate outcomes for group work.
Communicating strategy
Articulate and gather feedback on strategy.
High-level roadmapping
Paint a plan for your team.
Team scheduling
Plan the availability of your team, projects, rosters and other events.
Aligning on requirements
Break down that big problem into small pieces.

62. Inception Planning Build Tailor
Confluence for software teams

63. Inception Planning Build Tailor
Confluence for software teams

64. Meetings
Ad-hoc, regular , retrospectives, project status…
Build
Decision making
Move work forward by thinking collaborating on tough decisions.
Progress reporting
Confluence can be your window into Jira.

65. Build / Decisions
WHY?
• Confidence in decisions
Create, discuss, explore different options for decisions related to
your project or team.
• Build in shared knowledge
Help new members understand how a decision came to be with
context on each decision.
• Align stakeholders
Provide clarity on the big decisions which need to be made and
who is responsible for each one.

66. Build / Decisions
Leafdecisions
Fast,trivial-to-reverse
decisions.Optimiseforspeed.
Branch
Somewhereinthemiddle
Trunk
Hard-to-reversedecisions.
Optimisefordeepthinking.

67. DACI Framework
Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed
Out-of-the-box, modify it for your needs.

71. Build / Decisions
MAKE BETTER DECISIONS
• Confluence Decisions Template
Out-of-the-box, modeled on the DACI framework. Focus on on
the bigger, hard-to-reverse decisions.
• Work together to explore options
Collaborate, comment, edit with teams to ensure you’ve
explored effective ways to make the decision.
• Customize to fit your needs
Modify the decisions template at a space or site-level to fit your
team or company process.

72. Build / Progress Reporting
WHY?
• Updates with context
Reporting on your projects form Jira in Confluence allows you to
provide commentary alongside your update.
• Collaborate
Reporting for Jira in Confluence allows your teams to have a
discussion around the updates and get on the same page.
• Reach all teams
Not all your teams might be using Jira. Communicate progress
to other departments in Confluence.

73. Build / Progress Reporting
HOW?
Jira Report
Templates
Jira Macro

74. Build / Progress Reporting
TEMPLATES TO GET YOU STARTED
Jira Report
Templates
• Change log
Keep a log of your teams progress or communicate deliverables.
Generate a static or dynamic list of JIRA issues from a saved
search, JIRA URL or JQL query.
• Status Report
Visually communicate the overall progress of your project with
your stakeholders. Generate charts from a saved search, JIRA
URL or JQL query.

78. Build / Progress Reporting
HOW?
Jira Report
Templates
Jira Macro

81. Build / Progress Reporting
JIRA REPORTING ❤ CONFLUENCE
Jira Report
Templates
• Change log and status reports
Bootstrap snapshot or dynamic charting from the Jira
• Jira issues macro
Insert single issues, a count of issues, table of issues, customize
your columns and charts!
• #protips
You can copy-paste a Jira issue filter, issue or search result to
automatically display in Confluence!

82. Build
Meetings
Ad-hoc, regular , retrospectives, project status…
Decision making
Move work forward by thinking collaborating on tough decisions.
Progress reporting
Confluence can be your window into Jira.

83. Inception Planning Build Tailor
Confluence for software teams

84. Tailor / Confluence to fit your software team
Modify
out-of-the-box
E.g. Requirements, Decisions…
Create
new
E.g. Personas, Interviews…
NEW

85. Tailor / Your building blocks
1. Page template
Your own, or modify an existing one.
Space Settings > Content Tools
2. Page properties macro
Add page metadata you want to capture
and report on. Can be anything! (Macros, links, mentions…)
3. Add label(s)
As part of your page template to allow you to report on
pages for your label.
CREATE/MODIFY YOUR TEMPLATE
@
STATUS
@

86. Tailor / Your building blocks
1. Create page
Your own, or modify an existing one.
E.g. Decision log, Customer interview home…
2. Page properties report macro
Use the report macro to decide what rows you want to report on.
Select the label name you’ve picked for your page.
3. “Create from template” macro
If you want to add a button that “adds another” of your template,
Checkout the create from template macro.
CREATE/MODIFY YOUR REPORT PAGE
CREATE ANOTHER…
STATUS
STATUS
STATUS
STATUS
STATUS
@
@
@
@
@

94. Inception Planning Build Tailor
Confluence for software teams

95. Inception Planning Build Tailor
Confluence for software teams
Decision making
Jira reporting
Roadmapping
Team scheduling
Requirements
Customer
interviews
Personas
Templates +
page properties +
“Create from
template”
= ❤
THANK YOU@sherifmansour | sherif@atlassian.com

96. Thank you!
SHERIF MANSOUR | SHERIF@ATLASSIAN.COM | @SHERIFMANSOUR