Doodle Supercharged Innovation With Jira Product Discovery

A scheduling innovator on a mission to maintain their edge with strategy

Doodle was the first online scheduling tool, and is still the only one famous for bringing many people together. Doodle made its name on its group polling feature, which invites meeting attendees to vote on their preferred timeslot. Today, the company is still known as a leader in one-to-many scheduling for everything from team meetings and company retreats, to weddings and friendly get-togethers.

To Chief Technology Officer Jens Naie and former Chief Product Officer Stephanie Leue, this focus on bringing people together is what makes Doodle special. “There’s a strong connection between our customers and our company,” says Stephanie. “People have a sense of happiness when they talk about Doodle.”  

Doodle’s secret ingredient? Scaled-up strategy

To stay competitive in the now-crowded online scheduling space, Doodle’s team needed to evolve their offerings while staying true to their mission of making one-to-many scheduling as simple as possible. Otherwise, the company risked losing happy customers, market share, and their early-mover advantage.

When Stephanie stepped into her role as CPO, the teams’ passion and work ethic were clear. But the company felt like what she calls a “feature factory.” They were releasing plenty of useful features, but there wasn’t a clear, centralized product strategy connecting them to Doodle’s big-picture goals. 

“We had great researchers, who did an amazing job, but the things they uncovered were never translated into actual product work,” Stephanie recalls. Teams found it difficult to prioritize work, maintain Doodle’s competitive advantage, and feel connected to one another and the company’s mission. 

That’s when Jens and Stephanie decided to start using Jira Product Discovery for roadmapping across the organization. The Engineering Team was a long-time user of Jira Software so Jira Product Discovery was a perfect complement. Doodle added Jira Product Discovery to support Timofey’s prioritization model  — an expanded version of the Double Diamond model — across the entire company. Today, all teams use this framework, Jira Product Discovery, and Jira Software to prioritize, plan, and manage their work – bringing everyone at Doodle into alignment. 

Doodle’s goal: shift from feature factory to strategic scheduling leader

Stephanie first joined Doodle in March 2022 as Director of Product. When she was promoted to CPO the following year, she set her sights on strategic improvements. 

Up until then, Doodle’s prioritization had been relatively ad-hoc. The Product Team was shipping plenty of features, but those features weren’t part of a cohesive strategy. At the time, Engineering had been using Kanban boards in Jira Software for 15 years. These tools and methods worked well on the team level, but they weren’t connected to other parts of the company. 

“Strategic planning was basically just throwing sticky notes onto a Miro board,” Stephanie remembers. “People would ask why they were doing things, and we didn’t always have a good answer,” adds Jens.  

What’s more, because the C-Suite didn’t have visibility into what teams were working on, they’d check in often — sometimes daily — over email or Slack. Over time, this became distracting and discouraging for many team members. “If I'm asking my team, ‘What are you working on? What’s the progress?’ every day, that puts stress on their shoulders,” says Stephanie. “They’ll feel that I’m micromanaging them, when really I just need transparency.”

The situation didn’t feel true to Doodle’s values of excellence and enthusiasm. Fortunately, Jens and former Director of Business Agility Timofey Yevgrashin had a solution in mind. 

Structure and transparency help connect teams with strategy

Stephanie wanted to transform Doodle from a “feature factory” into a more thoughtful, strategic organization. Her vision was for every action, task, and initiative to connect to a business goal, and for every person to understand how their work fits into the bigger picture. 

To accomplish these goals, Stephanie and Jens began by adopting a new prioritization framework that would be used by the whole company, not just Product. At first, Stephanie didn’t think a tool would solve this problem. She felt the new framework could pair with Doodle’s existing tech stack, including Jira Software, to bring everyone into alignment.  

“I felt like this was a process issue – that a new tool should be our fifth or sixth priority,” she explains. “We had to find a way to communicate transparently, to the whole organization, how we move things from first ideation, through successfully finishing the measure phase.” 

But Jens and Timofey believed Jira Product Discovery would still be a valuable addition. They wanted to use the tool to augment Jira Software’s capabilities and scale it across Doodle, acting as a dynamic, interactive single source of truth for each project at all stages of the product development cycle.

Seamlessly connecting daily work to strategic vision

Jens was familiar with the Atlassian suite after using it in his prior role at a high-growth delivery company. Because Jira Product Discovery was designed to integrate with Jira Software, he and Timofey felt it would fit well with Doodle’s existing ways of working. They introduced Stephanie to the tool. 

“Jens and Timofey showed me how Jira Product Discovery could translate our entire process into a highly transparent workflow, connected to the work we were already doing in Jira,” she explains. “That was a mind-blowing moment. Jira Product Discovery is an additional layer on top of Jira, providing the structure and transparency we were missing in a way that’s easy for everyone at Doodle to access and understand.”

A custom framework to prioritize, strategize, and capture ideas

Together, Timofey, Jens, and Stephanie built out a structure for prioritization and roadmapping in Jira Product Discovery. Within the tool, Doodle’s leadership sets core pillars, which are aligned with different areas for potential growth and weighted based on the level of priority for each quarter. These pillars are translated into concrete, actionable Initiatives within Jira Product Discovery, which teams work on planning and delivering in Jira Software. 

For this new prioritization framework and tool to be truly effective, Stephanie and Jens knew it needed to be implemented across the entire organization. “The initial setup only took about two weeks,” Stephanie says. “From there, others just needed to jump on the train and start using the tool and process we’d already prepared.”

Now, the entire company uses Jira Product Discovery and Jira Software. “All teams, all departments, are using Jira Product Discovery for transparency,” Jens explains. “Most teams also use Jira Software. Their use case isn’t as advanced as Engineering, but all their work items are there.” 

Creating collaborative, organization-wide transparency

With Jira Product Discovery, every single initiative connects back to one of Doodle’s core strategic pillars, and is rigorously prioritized to ensure engineering hours go to those with the highest impact. “We want to make sure teams aren’t working on three or four things at a time, and that they can focus on the most important things,” explains Stephanie. 

Within the Engineering Team, managers can also prioritize more effectively when they need to build for other departments. “If there’s something we’re asked to build for Finance, how do we prioritize that against the next Product initiative?” says Jens. “Before Jira Product Discovery, the departments who were most vocal were served first, and that’s not good prioritization. For me, it was important that we enable a cross-functional Product Development Team, who occasionally builds for other departments.” 

A new era of collaboration, communication, and innovation

“Now, Doodle’s not building features, we’re building experiences,” Stephanie says. With her and Jens’ leadership, along with Jira Product Discovery, Doodle has transformed planning and prioritization from an ad-hoc task — something that took time away from other initiatives — into a strategic, integrated part of their ongoing workflow. 

What’s more, this planning process takes a fraction of the time it used to. Doodle leadership used to spend as much as 14 hours per quarter planning in Miro. Today, all it takes is a 20-minute monthly steering session to review what’s in Jira Product Discovery and move forward. 

As a result, Doodle’s teams have seen massive improvements in four key areas.

1. Refocusing resources towards innovation

When Stephanie started as CPO, the product team was spending almost no time on innovation because the majority was spent on existing customer experience improvements. Now that Doodle is clearer on their priorities and working more efficiently, the team has shifted 50% of resources toward innovation. 

2. Radical transparency, seamless collaboration

Doodle’s strategic goals and plans live in Jira Product Discovery. Once teams align around what they will build, they use Jira Software for development and delivery. Since the tools are connected, teams can track tasks at a granular level in Jira Software and keep a bird’s-eye view of work in motion with the progress bars in Jira Product Discovery. With easy ways to track work at a glance or dig into the details, leaders have full visibility and don’t need to tap team members on the shoulder for updates. 

3. More engaged employees who know their “why”

Since implementing Jira Product Discovery, Doodle has seen employee net promoter scores rise, and team members consistently mention Doodle’s culture of transparency on employee surveys. Teams no longer need to reassure leadership that they’re getting things done, helping them feel more trusted and valued. And because every task connects back to a strategic pillar in Jira Product Discovery, everyone understands which broader goals their hard work supports and where they fit in with Doodle’s big picture. This is especially powerful for engineers, who are now building every day with a greater sense of purpose.

4. Measuring success holistically, with more detailed metrics

Since adopting Jira Product Discovery, Doodle hasn’t just seen improvement in critical metrics; they’ve changed how they measure success. After moving from measuring product velocity to analyzing cycle time more holistically, Doodle has seen an estimated 25% reduction in lead times. While they still track net promoter scores (NPS), they now emphasize the more detailed Customer Effort Score (CES) system and have rapidly boosted scores from 3.6 out of 5.0, to 4.0 and higher. 

A future-ready scheduling brand, better poised to prioritize, plan, and bring people together

Since adopting Jira Product Discovery, Doodle’s teams are more focused, aligned, and empowered to simplify scheduling in entirely new ways. “Today, we feel confident that we’re delivering a great customer experience, and our CES and NPS scores prove us right,” says Stephanie. “So, we’ve been able to shift our core focus towards future-ready concepts.”

For instance, one of Doodle’s newest products, Sign-up Sheets, allows Doodle’s diverse users – from business professionals to groups of family and friends – to invite as many people as they want to predetermined time slots.

With Jira Product Discovery, Doodle is going beyond expanding and improving their products. Guided by Jens’ and Stephanie’s inspired, collaborative leadership, the company is embracing an entirely new paradigm. Now, their customer-centric culture is backed by radical transparency, rigorous prioritization, and strategic, data-driven decisions. By improving their discovery and planning processes, Doodle is poised to continue bringing people together for decades to come.