The journey continues; it took a rather interesting turn this week as my team and I were tasked with creating a direct messaging app project on JIRA!

As newbies venturing into product management, most of my team members were not conversant with JIRA, but that didn't stop us. Our team lead and team members with prior knowledge of JIRA helped us through the learning process. We took classes, links to video tutorials were provided, etc. As they say, Teamwork makes the Dream work!

We adopted the Agile methodology by breaking down the task into several phases with constant collaboration and continuous improvement at every phase.

To ensure that the project progressed smoothly, we held regular Scrum ceremonies. These included a sprint planning meeting with the team, daily standup meetings, sprint review meetings, and sprint retrospective meetings.

DAILY STANDUP

Our daily standups were scheduled for 9:00 PM and we basically discussed what we achieved for that day and how far we have gone with our tasks. We also discussed blockers we had individually.

SPRINT PLANNING

We started out by giving our app the name "CHATUP." During our sprint planning, we discussed the feature we wanted in the app and arranged them in the order of importance. We also discussed what we wanted at the end of every sprint which is our goals.

For the first sprint goal, we want users to be able to onboard and perform basic messaging features.

SPRINT REVIEW

As a team, we went through a mock retrospective of what we planned for the first sprint.

• Was there a task removed from the sprint? No task was removed from the board

• Did we finish all tasks for this sprint? No tasks were completed

• What was the reason a task was not accomplished? Developers were not available to carry out the projects.

SPRINT RETROSPECTIVE

• What did we do well during this sprint?

Each PM carried out their tasks by creating user stories and acceptance criteria.

• How do we improve in our next sprint?

Endeavor to join daily standups and contribute to our meetings.

One challenge we faced during the process was having the full team present in each of our daily standups.

Overall, the experience of creating ChatUp was interesting and enlightening, as we got to learn how to navigate JIRA, create issues on our backlog, run sprints, and gain experience in the use of Scrum methodologies.

Week two came, and we conquered. On to the next one! Week three!