Enterprise Jira Cloud Migration & Operating Model Redesign

As Program Lead and acting Product Manager for our internal tooling stack, I owned the end-to-end Jira Cloud migration—covering design, execution, and post-go-live operating model. This included all Jira projects, Jira Service Management queues, integrations, and reporting used across Engineering, Product, Managed Services, Professional Services, Pre-Sales, Sales, and Support.

The challenge was to move a mission-critical workflow platform into the cloud while protecting SLAs for more than 3,000 clients, standardising processes, and improving observability rather than just “lifting and shifting” the existing setup.

The program concluded as a triumphant migration: minimal issues, no critical incidents, and a new, cleaner Jira Cloud operating model aligned to future product and service growth.

• Acted as Program Lead and Product Owner for internal tooling, defining migration strategy, success metrics, and rollout phases.
• Owned the stakeholder map across Engineering, Product, Managed Services, Professional Services, Pre-Sales, Sales, and Support.
• Designed and enforced intake workflows, change controls, and prioritisation rules for migration requests and dependencies.
• Built executive and operational dashboards for status, risk, incident volumes, and SLA adherence.
• Led cutover planning, communications, feedback loops, and hypercare, directly overseeing incident triage and post-migration improvements.

The architecture combined legacy Jira Data Center, migration orchestration, validation layers, and the new Jira Cloud / JSM footprint, with analytics feeding executive MI.

• Discovery & Product framing: mapped all Jira usage patterns, workflows, SLAs, and reporting dependencies; defined personas (engineering, PM, CS, PS, Sales) and their core jobs-to-be-done.
• Intake & prioritisation engine: created a structured intake workflow for migration requests and edge cases, ranked by client impact, revenue, SLA risk, and technical complexity.
• Stakeholder governance: set up steering committees, working groups, and decision logs to align Engineering, Product, and GTM functions on trade-offs and sequencing.
• Phased execution & rehearsal: ran dry-runs, parallel validations, and controlled cutovers to de-risk high-value or complex client sets.
• Feedback loops: captured qualitative feedback and incident themes in JSM and fed them back into configuration, documentation, and training assets.

To keep 3000+ clients and multiple internal teams aligned, I formalised a RACI model across key workstreams—migration strategy, tooling, communication, cutover, and reporting.

I designed a suite of dashboards for executives, program stakeholders, and operational teams, combining Jira data, JSM incidents, and SLA metrics into a single source of truth.

• 100% migration success for projects and queues, with no critical incidents during cutover.
• Delivered on-time and on-budget against the approved program business case.
• Reduced operational overhead and duplication by ~30% via standardised configurations and cleaner permission schemes.
• Improved stakeholder visibility with live dashboards for progress, risk, incidents, and SLA adherence.
• Established a reusable cloud migration playbook and governance model for future internal platforms.