Connecting with Jira Align
Jira Align is a product whose time has come. Its story begins with agile frameworks created in the 1990s for development teams to deliver quality products early and often. When leaders of these frameworks met in Snowbird, Utah, to formulate the Agile Manifesto in 2001, team-level execution was still the focus. But the world has grown more complex in the two decades since, with the need for diverse sectors such as banking, automotive, and government to embrace digital transformation. As organizations struggle to create ever larger and more complex systems and even systems of systems (such as aerospace and military applications), the need to coordinate the delivery of numerous agile teams has grown more pressing.
In 2007, entrepreneur and technology executive Steve Elliott teamed up with a talented engineer to answer this challenge by creating what would become AgileCraft and later Jira Align – a way to break down the barriers between product management, project management, and engineering to coordinate and deliver complex product development efforts. As the tool was taking shape, a new type of agile framework was emerging, one that harnessed the power of successful agile team delivery and scaled it both upward to teams within teams and ultimately the enterprise, and outward to parts of the organization not traditionally associated with agile.
AgileCraft has had a close working relationship with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), the leading framework for agile at scale, since SAFe was launched in 2011. After 7 years of rigorous, real-life testing during his tenure as a technology executive, Steve left his day job and launched AgileCraft in 2013 to help companies achieve enterprise agility at start-up speed. By 2015, AgileCraft was named a Scaled Agile Gold Partner and Gartner Cool Vendor.
In 2016, Team AgileCraft scored its first Fortune 10 client, AT&T, which adopted it as a companywide standard in 2017 after delivering its mobile TV product using the platform. In 2018, Gartner named AgileCraft a visionary in the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) Tools. In 2019, Gartner named it a leader and Atlassian acquired AgileCraft. Today, known as Jira Align, it is still a leader, if not the leader. Moreover, the product is continuously improving, with new features and enhancements released every 2 weeks.
