Aha! Roadmaps | How to import a Jira backlog into your Aha! account as ideas

If your engineering team has been using Jira to manage their work for a while, chances are that they have a sizable backlog that contains a combination of well-defined feature work, tech debt, and various low-value issues. A bloated backlog can be a nuisance to your engineering team. It would be ideal to remove work from Jira that you know is perpetuating clutter and cramping engineering workflows. But you do not want to lose it all — some of the work just needs more strategic context from your product team before it is implemented.

In this article, we will export and clear work from a Jira backlog and import it into an Aha! account as ideas. Those ideas can then be reviewed, defined, reprioritized, and sent back to the engineering team when the time is right. Follow along and give it a try!

Click any of the following links to skip ahead:

• Confirm user permissions

• Export backlog from Jira

• Prepare CSV for import

• Import CSV into your Aha! workspace

• Clear your Jira backlog

• Promote the best ideas to your roadmap

Confirm user permissions

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Export backlog from Jira

The Jira integration enables us to import work into Aha! Roadmaps. But we also want to clear our backlog from Jira, so using the integration to import work would only solve part of our problem. We will instead export our backlog from Jira as a CSV. This lets us delete the backlog in Jira without completely losing it. Once the work has been imported, we can score it, promote it to our roadmap, and then send it back to the engineering team in Jira, Aha! Develop, or whatever development tool they are using.

We are using Jira Cloud, and for this example, we will export all the issues in a single Jira project. If you want to follow along:

• Navigate to Issues within the appropriate Jira project.

• Conduct a filtered search to find the work you want to import into your Aha! account. Consider which fields are essential to the work you will be importing and structure your query to include those fields. We also recommend you refine your query to exclude non-essential fields. This will create a cleaner CSV that contains all of the fields you need and none of the fields you do not need.

• Click Export issues, and select CSV as your desired file format.

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Prepare CSV for import

Next, let's take a look at our CSV as a spreadsheet and prepare it for import.

Check that you have columns for Name, Description, and Created by. You can also take time to remove any rows that you do not want to import. This step is optional — once you have imported your backlog as ideas, you can always remove those items.

Our CSV file looks right, so I'm going to save my changes. Now we are ready to import!

If you do not have a column titled Created by, the CSV will not import successfully.

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Import CSV into your Aha! workspace

1. From your Aha! account, navigate to Settings ⚙️ -> Workspace -> Import from CSV.

2. Select Ideas from the record type dropdown.

3. Select the workspace you would like to import your backlog into. This will be the workspace that you will use to manage your ideas.

4. The next step is to select the portal you would like to import your ideas into. In this case, we will select None because we do not intend for portal users to view, vote, or comment on the ideas we are importing. We can always make selected ideas visible in our portal later. If you have a private portal where the ideas you are importing would be appropriate, you may want to select a portal in this step.

5. Click Choose a file and select the CSV you just edited.

6. You will see a preview of your import. Check that all your CSV columns match the ideas fields you want to populate with your backlog data.

   

7. Click Import.

8. Navigate to Ideas Overview. See all the ideas you just imported.

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Clear your Jira backlog

Now that the backlog has been imported successfully, the team may no longer need that work in Jira. If you are following along, let your engineering team know what you have done — they may choose to delete the Jira records that you just exported and imported into Aha! Roadmaps.

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Promote the best ideas to your roadmap

With your engineering backlog decluttered and all the work ready in Aha! Roadmaps where your product team works the most, you can now review, prioritize, and promote ideas to meaningful work on our product roadmap — and send it back to our engineering team when they are ready to commit to it:

• Use the product value scorecard to estimate an idea's value.

• Rank and prioritize ideas using the Prioritization page.

• Bulk edit to update or promote ideas to Aha! records like features, epics, and initiatives. Then you can send relevant work back to your engineering team in Aha! Develop, Jira, or wherever they are working.

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