Dogfooding - a story of how business teams can help you understand your customers

In this presentation, I will cover how the Tempo marketing team uses Tempo and Jira to stay on top of priorities and to communicate the status of tasks to other teams. The solution involves a Jira project, an Asana integration, multiple ways to track time and a rigorous approval process. Not only does the set up allow the team to easily update and communicate the status of tasks but it also helps us understand how long projects take and whether we are focusing on the right things. Looking back at where the team has been spending their time ensures we are not spending too much time in useless meetings and that we spread our time evenly between strategic initiatives. During Covid, tracking time has also allowed us to get a big picture view of sick days and vacation days, making sure team members are not overburdened or overwhelmed.

Using our own products to track and report on time, opens up the possibility for us to give feedback to the development teams on our experience with our own products and suggest ideas for feature improvements. This can range from giving input on early feature designs or anticipating customer reaction to changes or new features to helping moving into new segments like expanding the usage of Jira into business teams like marketing, HR or legal.

All in all, getting feedback from various sources is invaluable for any development team and using your own products (also known as dogfooding) should always be encouraged. 

About Tempo

Tempo is an Icelandic software company that was founded in 2009. Tempo helps teams to collaborate, plan and schedule resources, manage budgets, and track time directly from their daily workflow in Jira. Since 2009, we’ve built a network of over 20,000 customers, both large and small, all over the world.

• www.tempo.io
• https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/6572/tempo-timesheets-time-tracking-reports?hosting=cloud&tab=overview