Making Jira do more so you don't have to

I have been a long-time user of Jira, originally unwillingly, until I figured out how to make it sing and dance for me.

As a Product Manager, I have worked with many Engineering teams and heard many complaints about Jira, Agile, and "the way projects work around here."

Knowing that the folks I work with are being held back from getting work done, because of the tooling bugs me. When I find a problem, I want to dig in and understand it, so we can fix it and move forward better than we started.

A couple of pro-tips that I have found work really well with Jira, that also enable the list below to be possible:

I have never seen an Engineering team use a Jira project for a single project. Use a Jira project for all of a team's work.
Organize the work by Epics, so that you can find things when you're ready
Stack rank your epics from the Backlog Epic View, so that the most likely epics to be used are at the top of the list and easily found.
Advanced Roadmap Timeline > Project Timeline, but project timeline can be helpful for team-only planning and organization.

A couple of things that I have managed to do with Jira, that I am proud of figuring out are:

Making blockers matter - more than using links between tickets and a status, setting Jira up so that blockers are actually useful for planning, estimations, and reducing WIP.
Setting up ticket hierarchy in an intuitive way that enables sharing of information, linking work from multiple teams
All of these things feed into Jira Advanced Roadmaps, which is a pay-to-play feature worth every cent … if you use it well.