Reinforcing cross-functional collaboration in Confluence and Jira with Smart Terms
All successful projects come from the strength of the team behind them. Shared goals, careful planning, on-time execution, and precise alignment. This makes cross-functional collaboration one of the keys to success and impactful results in the current business environment.
Some teams’ functions are highly interlocked with other teams, such as marketing, sales, and product teams, and they must work together on shared goals and processes. Using collaborative tools like Atlassian’s Confluence and Jira significantly improves these teams’ knowledge sharing, progress tracking, and overall project flow. However, it can also expose a deeper issue: confusion due to differing terminology.
In fact, marketing, sales, and product teams often encounter misunderstandings simply because they have different uses of one word, which might lead to confusion, misalignment, and delays. When using collaborative tools in cross-functional collaboration, where multiple departments work together, having a shared understanding is essential to ensure good communication and project execution. This is where a comprehensive shared glossary for Confluence and Jira becomes an invaluable asset to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
In this blog, we will go over how combining Confluence and Jira together supports business teams and cross-functional collaboration. Most importantly, we will also explore how using Smart Terms as your glossary for Confluence and Jira to clarify key terms makes cross-departmental workflows more efficient.
Cross-Functional Collaboration in Confluence and Jira
A typical cross-functional business team could include a product leader, someone from marketing, along with a representative from sales, and possibly other functions, depending on the industry. Of course, Atlassian’s collaborative tools are essential here. Not only Confluence and Jira but all of Atlassian’s products are built to enhance teamwork by connecting all departments through shared documentation and project management systems. Now, it is common for each one of these departments to operate within their own silos, with their own specific goals, data, documentation, and processes. So, even if all departments are using the same tools, Confluence and Jira, in this case, it’s most likely that they are using them in different ways and for different purposes.
In marketing, Confluence and Jira work hand-in-hand to support project organization and communication. For example, marketing teams use Confluence to plan campaigns, share creative assets, document strategies, and centralize resources. By organizing content in Confluence, marketing teams ensure that all documentation is accessible to everyone whenever needed. Hence, it’s easier for everyone, from content creators to strategists, to stay on the same page. Then, they rely on Jira Work Management to break down plans into actionable tasks, set timelines, assign responsibilities, and track the progress of each campaign component from content creation to launch. With Jira, marketing teams manage the real-time execution of different plans, maintaining clear deadlines, workflows, and status updates across projects. Therefore, these two tools provide a synchronized workflow when combined together. In this case, adding a synchronized glossary for Confluence and Jira ensures that every member of this marketing team operates from the same definitions, promoting a clear understanding within one team.
But it’s not only the marketing team that can combine Confluence and Jira to manage their work. In fact, sales, product, or any other teams can use Confluence for information-sharing and Jira to monitor updates or insights depending on their workflow. Hence, when we’re in a case of cross-functional collaboration, having consistent terminology across Confluence and Jira is crucial to avoid terminology confusion across departments.
Smart Terms: one glossary for Confluence and Jira
Smart Terms is a glossary for Confluence and Jira that further enhances teams’ workflow, solidifies alignment, clarifies goals, and strengthens collaboration within the same team or in cross-functional teams by allowing them to access and update a shared vocabulary. So, in cross-functional collaboration, all team members can contribute to the definitions that matter most for the project, ensuring everyone is on the same page.
A cross-functional collaboration between sales, marketing, and product teams is essential to maximize efficiency, better understand customer needs, and align goals. When these teams work in sync, a company can gain a strategic advantage. For example, Insights from sales can inform marketing approaches, refine product development, and ultimately create a better customer experience. When these teams work together in Confluence and Jira, each department can quickly view others’ progress, access updates, and avoid redundant efforts. Our team recognizes Confluence and Jira’s complementarity, so we made sure to integrate Smart Terms with both tools to bridge the terminology gap between department-specific jargon.
If you have been a part of one of these departments, you know that there are many common terms that hold small but also significant differences depending on their context. For example, a term like “lead” usually means a marketing-qualified lead to the marketing team, a lead who has indicated their interest in what a brand has to offer. However, to sales, it could refer to a sales-qualified lead, a lead that has a high probability of converting into a customer. Another example is that product teams might use the word “feature” to describe an internal project component, while marketing interprets it as a customer-facing capability ready to be promoted. This is where Smart Terms comes in handy and ensures that all teams are aligned on the exact meaning of critical terms.
This is why including Smart Terms for both Confluence and Jira isn’t just a nice-to-have for your team but instead a powerful tool to:
- Ensure consistency across teams by avoiding differing interpretations of terms.
- Enhance efficiency by providing accessible definitions wherever they are mentioned on both platforms and reducing time lost to clarify terms.
- Promote cross-functional understanding by bridging gaps between department-specific jargon.
- Support scaling knowledge by keeping track of all essential knowledge as teams grow or change.
Bridging the gap with Smart Terms
To better illustrate how this works in practice, let’s take an example of a SaaS company with active marketing, sales, and product departments that are struggling to keep their teams aligned. Marketing is running campaigns and using terms like “pipeline acceleration” and “conversion rates” in the different reports shared across the platforms. On the other hand, the product team strictly used “pipeline” to refer to development work. Sales, meanwhile, had a completely different interpretation of “conversion” than marketing, as they associated that term with the late-stage deal process.
To avoid confusion, delays, and misunderstanding of deliverables and priorities, this team uses Smart Terms to standardize terminology across the board. Adding key terms such as “pipeline,” “conversion,” and “lead” ensured that every team member could instantly access the definitions whenever they encountered those words in Jira or Confluence.
So, to get your glossary for Confluence and Jira, start by installing Smart Terms for Confluence and Smart Terms for Jira from the Atlassian marketplace. Here, both apps must be installed on the same organization’s cloud-based URL. You will also need to install Smart Terms for Confluence and Jira browser extension to allow terms to be highlighted. And if you’re still hesitating, Smart Terms for Jira is free for all Smart Terms for Confluence users. So you only buy one and get the other for free, it’s great, isn’t it? (you can also use this as an argument in case you have to get any purchase approval first 😉)
Once your app is all installed and running, you can go ahead and create your glossary by adding terms to different Confluence spaces.
To highlight your terms in Jira, go to Jira settings, toggle the Sync available Confluence glossaries to automatically highlight the space glossaries set in Confluence, or select the space glossaries from which terms can be highlighted in Jira. And, of course, you can add more customization and configure the appearance of terms per project from the Project settings.
And that’s it; you’re all set. Now, teams no longer have to guess. A quick hover-over or a click-on of the highlighted word mentioned in Confluence or Jira displays the term definition, media, and related terms. It helps your team to get the correct, context-specific definition that everyone can refer to, keeping everyone in this cross-functional collaboration aligned without needing clarification emails or follow-ups.
And to further improve understanding, you can create related terms in Smart Terms for Confluence to better illustrate how some terms are connected. Having related terms helps clarify complex concepts in your glossary for Confluence and Jira and makes it easy to navigate with direct links between related terms.
So there you go; using Smart Terms for both Confluence and Jira doesn’t just prevent miscommunication, it also empowers teams to move faster and with greater confidence. And if you want to know more about Smart Terms, here are 5 essential features you need to know about Smart Terms for Confluence, and how AI can help you set your glossary for Confluence with Smart Terms.
Do you still have any questions regarding Smart Terms for Confluence and Jira? Don’t hesitate to book a demo. Let us get to know you and answer your questions!
