If you purchase JIRA, commit to the whole Atlassian suite
I've seen companies try to mix and match platforms, and it was a nightmarish experience for everyone
Instead of writing about JIRA dashboards today, I was inspired to write about the cartoonish experiences I had with companies trying to integrate incompatible platforms with JIRA and Confluence.
Atlassian tools don’t come cheap, obviously. Although this capability shown below (1000 users) is only needed at the enterprise level, you can still imagine how steep the cost will still be for much smaller businesses.
Now, a number of managers feel they have strong enough software integrators where they can hack together a comprehensive solution only using basic JIRA functionality, such as issue tracking, custom workflows, and basic reporting. And sure, if your team is running a small Kanban board with 8 engineers and one product owner who moonlights as the scrum master, that might work for a while.
But here's where things start to unravel.
One company I worked with tried to sync their in-house ticketing system—built in a language no one on the current team actually knew—with JIRA, hoping to get end-to-end visibility on incident escalation. It broke within a week. Another tried to shoehorn Confluence into being both a documentation hub and a legal document signer. (Spoiler: that one involved four failed plug-ins and a legal compliance audit.)
The common thread in all these cartoonish attempts? Overconfidence in integration and underestimation of complexity. Everyone thinks they’ve built the bridge between platforms until a change to a single field schema breaks half your automations and sends stakeholders 47 identical status update emails.
The lesson? Just because JIRA can technically integrate with something doesn’t mean it should. Treating JIRA like a Swiss Army knife without understanding the actual cutting edge of each blade can cost you more than just money—it’ll cost you sanity, team trust, and a whole lot of duct-taped processes.
So no, I didn’t write about dashboards today. But I hope this serves as a gentle reminder: if your JIRA setup looks like a Rube Goldberg machine and feels like a house of cards, it’s time to rethink whether “hacking it together” is really the agile way—or just the chaotic one.
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I am always looking to take on complex projects—it’s a fun challenge that keeps me mentally fit. Feel free to DM or email (elecia@gmail.com) if you feel I’d be a great fit for your role.