JiraCopied

Jira began as an issue tracker for software developers. Over the years Atlassian launched versions for other teams, including Jira Work Management for marketing, sales and HR in 2021, which replaced Jira Core. At its Team '24 event in Las Vegas in May 2024, TechCrunch reported, Atlassian combined Jira Software and Jira Work Management into a single product under the Jira name, leaving Jira Service Management separate.

The rationale was collaboration. TechCrunch said developers and business teams needed to work together more than ever, and the new Jira was meant to remove old silos. Atlassian's own post quoted a view that people outside technical teams still thought of the Jira of the early 2010s, geared to engineers and hard to learn, and that the product now looked and worked completely differently. The merger brought AI features, including automatic breakdown of large work into smaller items, natural-language search and comment summaries, plus goals, a spreadsheet-like list view and a calendar.

Atlassian's announcement was cheerfully informal about it. Not everything you work on is an issue anymore, it said, and the new backgrounds were sold as a way to make Jira feel like home, with the company admitting it was more of a cute dogs-in-hats kind of team. The sidebar could be reordered, pinned and pruned, and the AI search would surface work from Jira, Confluence and other Atlassian apps.

At Team '24 Europe in October, Atlassian announced the next steps: a new look and much more customisation. The biggest surprise, TechCrunch said, was that Jira was retiring 'issues' as the default name for work; teams could call items tasks, launches, blockers or, still, issues. A simplified, customisable sidebar arrived, with a top navigation that puts AI-powered search front and centre, to be rolled out across all Atlassian products. Teams could set background colours, images and card covers, as in Trello, and Atlassian added a confetti cannon for moving work to done.

This is a brand change made in the product rather than the logo, and it is more honest for it.

Dropping 'issues' is a small word with a big signal: a tool for bugs becoming a tool for everyone. Confetti and custom backgrounds are borrowed charm from Trello. Whether marketers will love Jira is doubtful, but they may at least stop dreading it.