In the Loupe
In the Loupe
Breaking Down the Best - Atlassian (Trello, Jira, Confluence)
Atlassian is a suite of products including Jira, Confluence, and Trello.
The Atlassian suite offers powerful tools for business organization and knowledge management that can be adapted for jewelry retailers, with special focus on Trello and Confluence.
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Welcome to In the Loop. This is going to be a quicker episode, mainly because we got a couple of exciting things coming, including a JCK vlog which I'm really excited about, but that'll come out next week. But I really wanted to go over another Breaking Down the Best episode because I went through and I was listening to my Breaking Down the Best on the Google Suite and I was like you know what? This is kind of interesting. I'm going to do more of these. So here is my Breaking Down the best for the Atlassian suite, and that includes Jira, confluence, bitbucket and Trello and a couple of other ones. All right, let's jump into it.
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Speaker 1:And now back to the show. Okay, so we're talking about Atlassian and before we start, I'm going to put a couple things out there. The first is I love Atlassian. There's no product that is called Atlassian. It is a suite of products in a similar way to the Google suite. There's no product. Well, I guess there is a product that is Google search, but whatever, this is going to be less applicable to the day-to-day jeweler, but it's more.
Speaker 1:I think that there is one tool in here, or two tools in here, that I think you could actually start implementing at your store. What I will say is that these are infrastructure changes. These are not an easy switch for stores to make or businesses to make, and these are designed around tech companies, and one thing that's worth mentioning is that anytime you switch your infrastructure, it is a massive overhaul, and Punchmark made the switch to this in probably 2021, I think it was and it was a huge undertaking. Anytime you switch onto one of these, you really have to like you have to uproot everything and put it into this other thing, unless there's a good import. So I guess it's one of those steps that you can't take lightly. So the other thing that's important to know is, like I mentioned, this is for developers or for tech companies a lot of time. But some of these tools that are versatile enough that I think you know you could find using them in the day to day, especially Trello. Trello is a visual task board and it is essentially a virtual version of like a cork board where you can pin post-it notes up and then move them and move to-do lists and projects. What's really nice about it is it's virtual and you can like attach tickets and projects. If I was running custom jewelry projects, I would consider using Trello, but maybe let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's jump into actually talking about Trello. Not get ahead of ourselves, let's jump into actually talking about Trello. Trello is a visual organizational board and these things. What I think is so awesome about them is that it takes about one or two minutes to set up a Trello board. You can really you can I think you can have up to like 10 or 20 boards attached to your account and then even then it's just like oh, if you want another 50 boards, it's like $2 a month or something like that. So I use them to stay organized and I use them in college especially to organize projects, so like if there's multiple people, it'd be multiple components to a project Then what you could do is you could assign them to people, so you put your face on them, and then you could have these columns and that's what the whole thing is set up on is status columns.
Speaker 1:So on your far left a lot of times you have your to-do and then you have your next column. To the right could be something like next up or on deck, the right could be something like next up or on deck, and then your middle column is in progress. And it's nice to have an in progress column because then no one ever has to ask hey, what are you working on? They can see visually what you're working on, and that's something I had to get used to. And then the next could be in QC or ready for QC, and that means that usually you take your face off of it, or maybe you keep your face on it and then you assign a secondary person to QC, or maybe they are assigned permanently QC of the QC column.
Speaker 1:If anything comes in there, you know that the project owner is going to look through it, and then the last one might be either deploy or done or something like that, and we use this actually when we were building the vendor vault and what the vendor vault is. The way we used it was we would assign every single spread and component for the magazine and we would make it ahead of time. So we'd basically have the entire magazine done essentially in these cards, and inside of them you can attach all of the inspiration and reference, photos and notes that we took. Oh, it has to look like this and not like this, and that way when you open it up, it's almost like a little folder that has all of your information. I find it very useful to stay organized like this. I've used it for things like personal projects. I used it for an art opening one time not this most recent one, but the one before and what it did is. It just allowed me to stay organized and visually know where things were and not feel overwhelmed.
Speaker 1:I have a lot of anxiety and one of the things I've learned is that if I write everything down and I get all the pieces out of the box is what I always say If I take all the pieces out of the box, then I kind of feel less overwhelmed. It's more in front of you. So that's Trello. It takes two seconds to sign up for. Uh, get a Trello going. I might even consider doing it. If I use the custom uh, if I was doing custom jewelry, I might think about doing that too. You need to stay organized. I'm sure you have a ticketing system or whatever, but what's cool about Trello is you can actually attach PDFs and stuff to it and you can make it have a new status. It's like the status is that it is paid or something like that. So a lot of these products what you'll learn is that they are sandboxes and there's no rules and instructions on how to play with a sandbox. A lot of the times, instructions are left intentionally loose with that loose UX and make it so that you can kind of experience it a little bit more. I've seen people do different things with their columns and stuff that I would never have thought and maybe is arguably less intuitive than the way that I would use it. But if it works for them, then it works All right. That was Trello.
Speaker 1:The next is similar but different. This one is called Jira, and Jira is the million dollar word. At Punchmark. We have a Jira for everything. A Jira essentially means a project, but it's more kind of complex than that. What I like about Jira is that it's essentially Trello, just with hierarchy. So what I mean by that is that you can have different types of Jiras that cascade and nest underneath the larger version of it. So, for example, if I might have a big project at Punchmark, let's just say I am redoing the cart, let's just say, all right, I'm going to redo the cart on on Punchmark and all websites.
Speaker 1:Well, that is going to be what's called an epic. An epic is kind of like, you know, like the Odyssey, you know like the Odyssey. The Odyssey is the epic, but then there are subsects of the Odyssey that are like stories. That's what they're called. So a story in the Odyssey could be like the Lotus Eaters, so that one contains individual chapters as well and those chapters are tasks chapters as well and those chapters are tasks. So, for example, in JIRA there's an epic, and an epic has stories inside of. The stories are tasks and it even can go as far as a subtask.
Speaker 1:A lot of times with subtasks they are more like a checklist item, but they still can be assigned out, and the reason why that's good is that what I have found is that when you're doing larger projects. You really don't get the velocity on your project if you are stuck in the starting stages. So what you can do is with an Epic, you can break all these subtasks out. So, for example, with the cart example, the cart could require these components. It's like, okay, we need to have the address section and the credit card section and the shipping options section. Each of those is a story. But then on the credit card section, you also might have, for example, a whole segment like you know, apple Pay versus credit card, pay versus financing, and having those sections you could then, underneath those individual parts of the component, it could be just like build it out, qc it and then merge it or something like that, or like get rid of it. So having those hierarchical well, what a word.
Speaker 1:Hierarchical segments to your project can make things a little bit more visual and also give you some velocity, if you know what I mean. So what we mean when we talk about velocity, we mean like you're moving, you're going through the project, you know where to go next and you have this intuitive link with your project that allows you to keep pushing forward at higher and higher speeds what I always like when I was a scrum master is that when you give someone a project, the first week you're always underwhelmed by their progress, and then the second week they get done what you kind of expect, and then the third week they are flying, and then you kind of keep that velocity and a lot of the times I was in favor of velocity over. You know the need for easy grabs, for example. Easy grabs meaning like, oh, here's a layup project that's super easy, like, can you just take this and quickly do it? A lot of the times I would actually pass on those projects to other developers and I would assign the same dev a project that could stretch over weeks, because I was a big fan of velocity and continuing a project until it was done, because when you have to shift gears, a lot of the times I felt like it slammed on the brakes. So Jira is a little bit more of a dev tool than it is, than it would be available for everybody else Again, also free and Trello and Jira are essentially the same thing, except Jira is just super souped up.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I'll start to touch on now, trello, is the least of this, but Jira, I would argue, is the most of this is the ability to have this like Symphony, an ability to integrate and work with these other products all in one. Jira has all these integrations with Confluence, bitbucket and Status and things like that. It's pretty cool how they all work together. It's all because they're under one suite and, just like in my episode on Google Drive, when you start using the tools to their fullest, you start realizing that they were made to work together. You know, just like how forms Google Forms can pipe information easily into Google Sheets and have an easier way to kind of visualize things. So too do the Atlassian products work together. Okay, enough of that, let's keep moving. The next one is going to be the one that I probably understand the least.
Speaker 1:So, again, when it comes to Bitbucket, bitbucket is kind of like a repository for your code, and what that is interesting about is we have to give another metaphor, and the metaphor when it comes to writing code is you kind of have to understand that Punchmark's code base is essentially, let's just say it's like a gigantic book series. It is Game of Thrones, and actually that's a good example, because Game of Thrones is still not done. Come on, and actually that's a good example, because Game of Thrones is still not done. Come on, george RR Martin. So you have this entire, many thousands of pages long series, but let's just say the book's never published. Or the book did publish all seven of them and they're out, but the published version is changing. But the published version is changing. That's what the code base is for. Punchmark is. The code base that we launched with version six is essentially the same as when we deployed it.
Speaker 1:The only thing is is that we have made hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of patches to it, and what a patch is is essentially, you're rewriting a section of the book, and what a patch is is essentially you're rewriting a section of the book. So back to the you know Game of Thrones books. Let's just say, when he released them, he put them all out, but there's like a lot of misspellings and there's parts of the story that don't really make sense, or there's redundant sections, because, like, a chapter is in there twice and you know it doesn't really make sense to have it in there twice. Well, what Bitbucket could do is you could have, for example, in this metaphor, have multiple writers working on your book and then they would go in, for example, and they would take a page 72 from book three and they could take it out and then they would maybe rewrite some of it. They fix some spellings and they re orchestrate a couple of paragraphs and they make it a lot cleaner and tighter, maybe according to a reader's feedback or maybe according to their own feedback. And then what Bitbucket would allow them to do in this code kind of metaphor is then they would take that nicely rewritten piece of paper and then put it back into the book and then suddenly the book is complete and altered.
Speaker 1:But what would be important is, if you rewrote some of the book, it would be important to first of all give context. Why did these changes get made? So maybe when you put that little sliver of the book in, you might put like a little post-it note on the side of or in the column of the paper that says fixed spellings here, here, here, reorganize the paragraph removed, that so-and-so was eating this. Well, that's an easy one. You put it in there. Suddenly the book is better. And that would be an example of a developer improving some of the code base and merging it is what we call it merging it back in. However, it's also important. Let's just say if later on in the book it's you know, that chapter referenced that so-and-so was eating this. Well, if later on the book that becomes relevant, oh he, uh, chokes on this. It's important for them to make sense. So that could be an example of a conflict. So what Bitbucket allows is it would allow to show if there might be conflicts, and then they would need to be resolved before the rewritten piece of paper is inserted back into the entire, you know, compendium of books. Wow, that is a crazy example, but that actually does explain it pretty well.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to get too into it because I know that the people who I'm listening to are mainly jewelers, so, and not tech people. But that's one thing that we use, and I think that I'll probably move on the next one and this. I'll skip the last two or I'll kind of breeze over the last two, but this one is also actually one that I think would be very useful for jewelers to use, and this is probably my favorite. So this is called Confluence, and what's funny is that Confluence is an actual word, a confluence of things, but confluence is essentially a private Wikipedia for your whatever.
Speaker 1:You need to know, or you have written about it, and what happens is a lot of times. I mean, raise your hand, if you're guilty of writing an instruction manual for something in like a Google document or in a Microsoft document and then printing it out or writing it on a piece of paper and pinning it up, well, that's all well and good. But what happens when you have people that are not in the same spot and then you can't write it? Or what happens when you can't find it? Or what happens when you have multiple employees and they all have their own instruction manuals and then suddenly, maybe people are writing the same instruction manual twice because they didn't know it had been written already. Or what happens if an employee gets fired or leaves and they have a lot of the instruction manuals and then suddenly no one knows how to use the tools because the instruction manuals are gone. That's the type of stuff that Confluence can solve, and I'm a big fan because I'm rather proud of this. I actually was the one who undertook and architected.
Speaker 1:We have two knowledge bases, so we use the term knowledge base a lot instead of confluence, but they're essentially the same thing is a knowledge base, is a, like this, centralized repository of information, and we have two of them, one of them you probably have used before. If you're a Punchmark client and that is the Punchmark knowledge Base it's on, you can look it up helppunchmarkcom. That's helppunchmarkcom and that is our knowledge base, and it has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of articles all in there, and what they all do is they're all cataloged by product type. So we have a section for site manager and a section for page builder and a section for how to's and frequently asked questions. We also have a section in there for our API. Our API explains, you know, for other developers and partner companies, how to use our products or integrate with our code base in an easy way, and we publish it freely so that people are able to do it easily.
Speaker 1:But we also have an internal confluence, and what I think is really cool about this is I have this one password protected, or essentially like permission protected, so you can't even find it or access it. I have it so that I have to approve you, and the reason why is there's kind of you know, some sensitive information in there, and what's cool is we even have certain sections of it that have sensitive information in it that are behind permissions. So, for example, we have a section where you have to be a director and above, and we have a section for developers and we have a section. I'm sure that there's. There might even be sections that I don't even know about. That's okay, but what's cool about it is that everybody that you grant permission to is able to edit it and it becomes this very easy to catalog and search centralized knowledge base. And it has 100% changed our company for the better.
Speaker 1:The biggest thing for it is we always used to make this joke and it's not in very good taste, but we used to make this joke about Brian, our CTO, and for a long time Brian was the chief as the chief dev. So much stuff was in his brain, so much he had built so much of the Punchmark code base and the platform and he was our what we call DevOps. He was our DevOps guy, so he was the one who, like, set up servers and infrastructure systems and we always used to joke that any time Brian would go up in a plane that suddenly the servers would get wonky and they would, like you know, start to, we'd get someone would try to DDoS us or someone would try to take one of our servers down. Or you know, or we just get a lot of traffic or something. Something was amiss and if we didn't know how to fix it ourselves, we would have to wait until Brian got out of the sky because he didn't have internet or service. And sometimes I still remember there was this one. It was like such an easy thing but it required like two factor authentication and it was like, oh, we can't fix it until Brian gets the two, the two FA back to us. And he landed, he sent it over, the two, the two FA back to us. And he landed, he sent it over.
Speaker 1:And the next meeting that I had, I sat Brian down and I said all right, brian, we have to get all of this stuff into a centralized location, otherwise, like we're too contingent on him, because imagine, you know what if something happened to him, you know what if he got sick, or what if he was, you know something unimaginable happened. Well, would that cause the death of parts of our company? No, that's not how it should be and I think that that's also something you should think about for your company. You should think about decentralizing your knowledge, which is the opposite of what I just said, because we're centralizing our knowledge but decentralizing away from a single person's mind. So start thinking about parts of your business that might be locked up if you're the owner. That might be locked up in your brain.
Speaker 1:For example, how do you do payroll If you're the only one who can run payroll? Well, what happens if you get sick and payroll is still due? Are you going to drag yourself out of bed while you're sick and do payroll? Admirable, but maybe there's a better way to do it. Maybe you could write a quick little bulleted instruction manual and make it so that people can can read it and follow it. And the thing about that is it doesn't even have to look nice. That's what I think is funny about Confluence is that our external one is dressed up because it's a product and we want it to look nice. We consider our knowledge base to be a product, even though it's integrated with the rest of our products. But our internal knowledge base a lot of the times looks terrible, and that is almost by design, because knowledge is more valuable having it down rather than having less of it and having it dressed up. So I 100% recommend you can get all this just by signing up with Atlassian, and Confluence is free. We haven't paid a single dollar for it ever.
Speaker 1:So the last two, which I'm going to breeze over and then I'm going to get to how to sign up for an Atlassian account, but the last two is one is called OpsGenie, and what this is? I had to look it up. This is OpsGenie helps IT and support teams respond to alerts and outages. It notifies the right people when something breaks fast so they can fix it before customers even notice. So essentially, the option is is it's like a canary in the coal mine. It lets you know as early as possible when anything is amiss, and what this can be is just these automated tests that pass information regularly. I won't get into it too much because, again, this is just IT and like techie stuff.
Speaker 1:But what you? You probably have an Ops Genie system in your, in your own company, but it's probably verbal. So you probably have a system, or you should have a system, where if something goes wrong, for example, a fire alarm goes off you know a fire alarm is essentially your version of Ops. A fire alarm goes off. You know a fire alarm is essentially your version of Ops Genie. It goes off. Well, you should probably leave the premise and you'll probably call what 911 or call the fire department. That's essentially what Ops Genie is going to do. Ross, if you're listening, I don't really know. Maybe explain it to me someday.
Speaker 1:And then the last is this is also from Atlassian, but we don't use this one. It's called a status page. Is status page? Essentially all of these things coming together and creating a visual display for what's going on with your products, products, and that way, if someone could be like oh, is something wrong with products, they can just check this page. And for me, I actually checked this one on. I've checked this one for Slack before, where it's like why is my Slack not loading? It's? It's broken all the time. What's going on? Well, what you can do is you can just pull up the same page it's like called like. Pull up the same page. It's like called like is slackdowncom or something like that, and it shows you know, yes, messaging has like a red light next to it and that usually means it's broken.
Speaker 1:You can see status pages in the wild, for example at, for example, ski resorts. Sometimes ski mountains have a status you know display next to their ski list and this will show you know this lift is down or this lift is experiencing super high traffic, maybe you should go somewhere else, or this lift is open and you know. So that way you know and you have your options up above. But status pages, it's important to remember, are only as good as the trust you build in them. And the second you start having, you know, slow or old statuses display, suddenly it becomes an issue.
Speaker 1:So that is the Atlassian suite of products. We have Jira suite of products. We have Jira, which is kind of like a super powered version of Trello. Jira allows these hierarchically categorized parts and components. Trello is more of like organizational to do visual task board. Confluence is good for knowledge-based systems and documenting things into a central repository so that everybody knows how to do everything which is important. Bitbucket, which is about code bases and being able to merge and develop books into each other. And we have Ops Genie, which is for alerts and outages in status page, which kind of displays them in visually to visitors. Okay, so that is the Atlassian suite.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about how you could sign up for one. So if you wanted to get an Atlassian account, so if you wanted to get an Atlassian account this is not sponsored but you could go to Atlassiancom. So that is A-T-L-A-S-S-I-A-N Again, that is A-T-L-A-S-S-I-A-Ncom, and all you got to do is just sign up with a Google account, a Gmail, and suddenly you'll have access to all of them Google account, a Gmail, and suddenly you'll have access to all of them. You'll need to create the spaces for where you'll actually use them, but that's the first step, and then, I would recommend, jump into a Trello, start to play around with your columns and suddenly, if these things sound interesting, I would love to walk you through one. Maybe reach out to me, michael, at punchmarkcom, I'd love to talk to you about it. So I think that's where we'll leave it.
Speaker 1:This is kind of one of those episodes I've, you know, been thinking about for a while. I listened to the last Google Suite one and I kind of liked it. I did explain it. I realized I didn't explain some of the products as well as I wanted to, but I think you get the gist and I hope that maybe I kind of explained Google Suite you know better than you knew it, or maybe I illuminated a tool or two that you had never even tried. But with this one. I don't know if all of these products are applicable to you, but I think some of them are especially Trello and especially Confluence for the knowledge base. I think that the better we're organized and the better we have centralized information, the better for everybody involved.
Speaker 1:All right, everybody. I think that's where I'll end it. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week, tuesday, with another episode. Cheers Bye, cheers Bye. All right, everybody, that's the end of the show. Thanks so much for listening. This episode was brought to you by Punchmark and produced and hosted by me, michael Burpo. This episode was edited by Paul Suarez with music by Ross Cocker. Don't forget to rate the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and leave us feedback on punchmarkcom slash loop. That's L-O-U-P-E. Thanks. I'll be back next week, tuesday, with another episode. Cheers Bye, thank you.
