How GrowingIO Designs Agile Project Management with Jira: Lessons for R&D Teams

Introduction

Projects are a crucial organizational method for achieving a company’s strategic goals, and the design of project management directly impacts product delivery and process outcomes. Jira, a highly configurable project‑management tool, meets the needs of companies of any size.

Since 2018 GrowingIO has used Jira Cloud for its growth platform R&D department, and this article shares the design choices and practices around work, personnel, and time.

Project Management

Project Classification

GrowingIO organizes projects on a quarterly basis, aligning company OKRs with three main project types:

Core product delivery projects led by product managers.

Key R&D team projects driven by development, focusing on major technical improvements or debt repayment.

Green‑channel projects that address high‑impact customer requests not on the product roadmap but with low implementation complexity.

Work Aspect

Each quarter’s OKR‑derived projects are broken down into epics, milestones, tasks, and sub‑tasks in Jira. Execution is demand‑driven, combining project‑level and demand‑level work breakdown structures for flexibility.

Personnel Aspect

Teams are organized as cross‑functional feature squads (product manager, designer, front‑end, back‑end, data, and QA) rather than project‑specific groups, fostering domain expertise and self‑organization.

Time Aspect

Work proceeds in synchronized sprints; each sprint starts with planning and ends with a retrospective. Jira’s Scrum and Kanban boards support sprint planning, execution, and monitoring.

Why This Design?

The approach ensures OKR completion while providing flexibility for custom customer demands, guarantees regular deliverables, improves team expertise, and enhances self‑organization.

Requirement Management

Different demand sources are managed in separate Jira projects, each with specific issue types to clarify task goals and support iteration analysis.

Feature Request (FR) Project : Collects all customer‑requested features; includes Feature and Epic issue types.

Infrastructure (INFRA) Project : Handles operational requests such as system upgrades, POCs, and production incidents; issue types include Task, Upgrade Request, POC Request, and Production System Fault.

Product Iteration (PI) Project : Manages all iteration‑related work; issue hierarchy includes Project level, Epic, Feature, User Story, Tech Improvement, Task, Sub‑Task, Sub‑Bug, Production Issue, and Engineering Service.

The diagram below illustrates the classification logic of main issue types in the iteration project.

Iteration Management

Iteration work is divided into three phases, each with defined time windows:

Iteration Preparation

PRD Review – completed one sprint before development.

Tech Design & Review – creates technical solutions for upcoming work.

Sprint Grooming – prioritizes tasks and defines acceptance criteria.

During Iteration

Sprint Planning – estimates effort, complexity, and uncertainty to set sprint goals.

Sprint Implementation – uses Jira Scrum/Kanban boards, daily stand‑ups, and visual cues (due dates, status colors) to track progress.

Code Freeze – only sub‑bug fixes allowed after freeze.

UAT & Sprint Review – QA conducts full regression; product and design teams accept deliverables.

Release – version deployed to internal demo environment for feedback.

Iteration Retrospective

After each sprint, a retrospective report is generated, leveraging Jira statistics (sub‑bug count, cumulative flow diagram, control chart, burn‑down chart) to gain insights and drive continuous improvement.

Conclusion

The article shares GrowingIO’s project‑management design and practices, acknowledging that the process is still evolving and inviting feedback to refine the approach.