What Your Last 500 Jira Tickets Reveal About Your Strategy and ROI

If we pulled the last 500 Jira tickets your teams completed across all your product lines, what story would that data tell your executive team?

You have multiple products, multiple squads, and months of engineering effort buried in those 500 tickets. Yet in most organizations, if I ask a simple follow up -- what did you actually build, why did it matter, and how did it move the business -- the room goes quiet.

Velocity went up. Story points were burned. Sprints were closed.

But how did any of it impact revenue, retention, cost, or risk?

If You Analyzed Your Last 500 Jira Tickets, What Would You See?

I like this thought experiment because it removes the theater.

Take the last 500 completed Jira tickets across your business, spread across however many product lines you have. Then ask:

Most teams cannot answer these questions in a clear, confident way.

They can tell you what got done. They struggle to explain why it mattered.

What Your Jira History Is Quietly Telling Your Executives

The business already knows what it is spending on R&D. Your CFO can pull that number in seconds.

What they usually cannot see is a clear link between that spend and business outcomes. Jira becomes an internal bookkeeping system for engineering activity instead of a window into value creation.

Here is how that looks in practice:

Meanwhile, the rest of the organization is moving toward harder metrics. IT and service teams are already tracking things like mean time to resolve, cost per ticket, and customer satisfaction to prove their value, as Atlassian outlines in its guide to IT metrics and reporting and service desk performance.

Product and engineering need the same level of accountability. Not more dashboards. More clarity on what we are building and what it is doing for the business.

I wrote about this broader challenge here: Are we really tracking outcomes, or just activity?

Why This 500 Ticket Audit Matters

This is not an agile process exercise. It is a leadership and strategy exercise.

When you can look at a block of work and clearly explain what was built, why it mattered, and how it performed, you unlock a few critical things:

Jira consultants and engineering intelligence platforms are already pushing teams in this direction. For example, CompanionLink shows how organizations measure ROI on Jira implementations, and Jellyfish breaks down core Jira metrics for engineering leaders that support better forecasting and accountability.

But tools alone do not fix the problem. You need a simple, honest way to look at what you have already shipped.

How To Run a 500 Ticket Jira Audit

Here is a practical way to turn your last 500 tickets into strategic insight.

1. Pull the right slice of work

Grab the last 500 completed tickets across a meaningful time window. For most mid market and enterprise teams, that is one to three months of work across several squads.

Include all work types: features, bugs, tech debt, ops, support. This is your real portfolio, not just the shiny roadmap.

2. Classify the work with a few simple cuts

You do not need a complex taxonomy. Start with three lenses:

If you already apply frameworks like value vs complexity, cost of delay, or weighted scoring in Jira, this gets even easier. Atlassian has a good overview of those methods in Your Guide to Jira Prioritization 2025.

3. Map each ticket to a strategic goal or KPI

For every meaningful cluster of tickets, ask: which objective was this work serving?

This is where you start turning Jira from an issue tracker into a strategy tracker. If you realize large chunks of work do not connect to any goal the business recognizes, that is valuable data.

4. Attach simple impact metrics

Next, add numbers. You are not trying to build a perfect financial model. You are trying to move from zero signal to directional signal.

Look for anything you can reasonably connect to this work, such as:

If you cannot connect any metric at all to large bodies of work, that is the real insight. It tells you where your measurement and feedback loops are broken.

5. Estimate revenue per story point

This is where things get uncomfortable and useful.

For the major initiatives hidden inside those 500 tickets, estimate the business value they created. New ARR from a feature. Savings from automation. Reduced churn from a retention improvement.

Divide that by the number of story points or engineering days that went into that work. Now you have a crude but powerful view of average revenue (or value) per story point.

Is it precise? No. Is it better than having no sense at all of ROI on your roadmap? Absolutely.

This is the kind of thinking Jira consultants talk about when they measure Jira implementation ROI, and what platforms like Jellyfish target with executive reporting workflows.

What Great Product Leaders Do With This Insight

Once you have this picture of your last 500 tickets, you will see patterns you cannot unsee. Here is how strong leaders respond.

1. They make "why" a first class field in Jira

Every significant ticket must answer three questions before work starts:

That can be as simple as required fields tied to a strategic objective and an expected KPI shift. It forces teams to articulate the outcome, not just the activity. I go deeper on this shift in From velocity to value.

2. They treat velocity as cost, not success

Story points tell you how much capacity you spent, not whether it was worth spending.

Great leaders pair delivery metrics like velocity, lead time, and throughput with outcome metrics like revenue, retention, and satisfaction. Team O'clock's guide to must track agile metrics is a useful reference here.

3. They rebalance planned vs reactive work

Once you see that half your work is unplanned, driven by whichever stakeholder shouts loudest, you can finally name the tradeoff.

Set an explicit target for planned vs unplanned capacity. Use Jira prioritization patterns like those in Your Guide to Jira Prioritization 2025 to protect strategic work instead of letting it be eroded every sprint.

4. They upgrade executive reporting

Executives do not need to see every Jira ticket. They need to see how R&D spend is translating into business outcomes.

That means dashboards and narratives that connect initiatives to KPIs: uptime, MTTR, CSAT, cost per ticket, revenue, adoption. Atlassian, Jellyfish, and others show how to wire this together with their guides on IT metrics and Jira performance metrics.

At Iteright, this is where we spend a lot of time with leaders: turning scattered activity into a clear story of value. If you are curious how we approach it, start with our piece on moving beyond execution with better storytelling.

5. They use the audit as a forcing function for bolder decisions

When you see that a whole product line has almost no tickets tied to clear business value, it becomes easier to ask the hard questions: Should we be investing here at all? Is it time to sunset something, as I discuss in navigating the product life cycle?

The 500 ticket audit is not just a reporting exercise. It is a mirror.

Where You Go From Here

You do not need a new framework or a new tool to start. You already have the data.

Pick one product line or tribe. Pull the last 500 tickets. Classify them. Tie them to goals. Attach any impact metrics you can. Calculate a rough revenue per story point.

Then bring that story to your executive team.

If you can clearly explain what you built, why it mattered, and what it produced, you are not just closing tickets. You are running a product organization that the business can understand and trust.

If you cannot, you have found your next strategic priority.

Either way, the work is the same: turn activity into outcomes, and outcomes into a story the business can stand behind. That is the bar for modern product leadership, and it is exactly the shift we help teams make at Iteright and through our solutions.

So ask yourself the question: If every story point is an investment, are you proud of the return your last 500 Jira tickets delivered?