Atlassian recently laid out its vision for combining two of its most famous software products: Jira Software for developers and the Jira Work Management tool for business teams, under one product umbrella. Jira was initially marketed to developers and the teams directly working with them but, over time, was used more broadly by business teams as well. That's one trend that Atlassian has quickly grasped through the roll-out of versions of Jira branded specifically to meet the various requirements of these teams. However, developers and business teams are now, more than ever, supposed to work together, and it is what old siloes the new Jira should get rid of.

At the Team '24 Europe event, the company on Wednesday announced next steps for new Jira, including a new look and new customization options. The biggest shock, though, may be that Atlassian is actually retiring "issues" as the default monicker for the work tracked in Jira. Well, "issues" are still an option, but users can now choose what they want to call their work: whether that's a "task," "subtask," "blocker," or "launch." Some of those may still present many issues, but you no longer have to call them that.

With this update, Jira is getting a new simplified navigation experience wherein users can customize the left side navigation bar to their preference. And talking of personalization, just like in Trello, people can now change background colors, images, and card covers of Jira to whatever they want.

For program managers, Jira is introducing something just for them: program boards. These boards fall between the detailed Kanban board and a team calendar but show the key work items across multiple teams on a variable cadence, depending on how a company's teams work.
 
Project templates are new in Jira, which allows enterprises to scale their processes across different organizations.

After all, no new product is complete these days without a few new AI-powered features. And for Jira, that makes up two: Loom, Atlassian's asynchronous video messaging platform can automatically generate an issue, a work item based on the video transcript, and Jira itself can now automatically break down a larger work task into smaller sub-tasks. Whether that all actually works nicely remains to be seen, of course.