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The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #78

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Hi there

I hope you had a great week!

Here are the topics in today's edition:

• JIRA Dashboards That Actually Work: Simple Setup, Big Impact
• Strategy in Real Life: Saying No Is the Hardest and Best Move

Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!

Talk soon 👋
Tom

LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

JIRA Dashboards That Actually Work: Simple Setup, Big Impact

Learn how to use JIRA dashboards to keep an overview without plugins. A simple setup with summary emails reduces chaos and improves clarity.

At Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded, we are avid JIRA users.

Of course, we use JIRA for our product and development teams. But we also use it for our ISO 9001 risk register, our ISO 27001 asset management, and to track customer onboarding projects.

Recently, we had a change in the leadership team. Our new Chief Customer Officer wanted to stop using JIRA in his team. JIRA would not help him maintain the overview, so I agreed. The two of us then embarked on a massive JIRA cleanup session, deleting thousands of old, confusing JIRA tickets.

Do you think the cleanup session was the end? Not at all. Even after the cleanup session, it was hard to keep an overview in JIRA. Here is what we did.

One Dashboard per JIRA Project

I love dashboards that fit on a laptop screen. They cut the illusion that bigger is better – because you also need the overview on the move, not just in your James-Bond-style control center with huge screens on the wall.

Here is a screenshot of the dashboard we maintain for each JIRA project:

Let’s go through each element on this dashboard.

• In the “open tickets assigned to me” tile, each user sees all the tickets assigned to them, sorted by ticket status. This makes it easy to keep the overview of what’s on my desk.
• In the “open tickets watched by me” tile, each user sees all the tickets watched by them, sorted by ticket status. This makes it easy to watch the progress of tickets worked on by other colleagues.
• The “all open tickets” tile shows all open tickets in the project, sorted by ticket status and issue type. It also shows the total number of open tickets in the project. This number visualizes whether the backlog grows or we keep up the close rate of tickets.
• The “open tickets customer team” shows all open tickets in the project assigned to a member of the customer team, sorted by team member name. Most tickets assigned to a member of the customer team are bugs reported by customers that need clarification – not all reported bugs are real bugs.
• The “open tickets dev/product team” shows all open tickets in the project assigned to a member of the development or product team, sorted by team member name. This helps the team lead and the product owner to plan the resources, as it is immediately visible who is overloaded.
• The “open tickets by label” shows all open tickets in the project, sorted by labels. In contrast to the pre-cleanup era, we only apply labels to relate issues to customers, plus very few labels to plan dev work (e.g., backend/frontend, iOS/Windows/Android, etc.).

And that’s it. No fancy plugins needed, just standard JIRA dashboard elements. We created those dashboards in around one day.

Daily Summary Emails

Dashboards are great for seeing the actual state of a JIRA project. However, as a product owner or team lead, I also want to keep an overview of tickets that are created and closed each day.

In JIRA, there is a built-in automation feature. We use it to set up daily summary emails. For each project, two daily summary emails are created at 6 pm:

• One email lists all the tickets that were completed in the last 24 hours, including a link to the ticket.
• One email lists all the tickets that were created in the last 24 hours, including a link to the ticket and the name of the person who created the ticket.

The distribution list of those emails includes the CPO, the product team, the dev team leads, and the CCO. In this way, everybody has the same understanding of new and completed JIRA tickets.

Conclusion

Keeping the overview in a company is hard leadership work that never ends.

Given that setting up dashboards and summary emails isn’t that much work, what are you waiting for? The better your overview, the less hectic and chaotic your daily work will become.

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INSPIRATION FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

Strategy in Real Life: Saying No Is the Hardest and Best Move

Saying no is the key to strategy: Cut distractions, focus on value, and build what matters. The past is a bad guide for the future.

We are living in challenging times. Geopolitics, inflation, pandemics, and climate change have a significant impact on our companies, societies, and governments. Budgets are tight everywhere, and there is no way near enough money to keep doing what we always did.

Time to strategize.

Strategizing in our times doesn’t mean sitting in an armchair and producing bloated prose about values, culture, or vision. Rather, it means defining what you will do with your limited resources, and therefore also what you will not do. There is nothing more important to strategy than focus, and having focus means having the courage to let go of everything that’s not relevant.

Let’s look at a few examples from my experience as Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company.

Feature Requests

When you build a new SaaS product out of nothing, the first product is more of an MVP than a real product. Therefore, your first customers naturally have many feature requests.

Fast-forward a few years. Your first customers are still your customers. Even though your product left the MVP stadium a long time ago, your first customers keep raising feature requests like machine guns. On top, your new customers have new requirements. And finally, the market has evolved, bringing about another set of new requirements.

And here you are, with a huge list of unprioritized feature requests. Some make sense, some don’t. Some are well-formulated, others are difficult to understand.

How can you consolidate an unprioritized feature request list into a roadmap that reflects your product strategy?

It starts with saying no.

There is a saying that those who scream loudest get served first. It’s the same for feature requests and noisy passengers at the airport gate. But those who scream loudest do not necessarily request those features that reflect your product strategy best. So you will have to say no to some feature requests.

It continues with consolidation.

A feature request is not the same as a feature. You will need to consolidate similar feature requests into a feature. In contrast to a feature request, a feature needs to reflect your product strategy. And it needs to cover a business use case — something end-users are notoriously bad at formulating. That’s the moment for your product team. Instead of working on individual feature requests, your product team should synthesize them into features serving a business use case.

And here is the danger: Product managers and developers are mostly engineers. They love complex problems. But the complex problems are not necessarily the ones that reflect your product strategy best. Always remember that you need to make money with your software product, and surprisingly often, it’s small and easy features that make customers happiest.

That’s my moment.

As the tech founder, it’s often my (ungrateful) role to say no to the product and development teams. I say no when they want to work on exciting technical problems instead of simple features that the majority of our customer base is waiting for.

Standardization

When you start a business, everything is non-standard by default. It’s the first time you do each task, and you have no reference points and no experience on how to increase efficiency.

Fast-forward a few years. You will have amassed a customer base and built a team. You can no longer work the way you did in the early days. To scale efficiently, you will need to standardize everything you do.

Let’s start with your product. Your first customers had a heavy influence on your product. That doesn’t necessarily mean that their ideas were super-scalable. Although you still highly esteem your first customers, you will have to tell them that your product has evolved. Some things will not work the same way as they used to five years ago. You can convince most customers about the benefits of such changes with more automation, less interaction with your support team, and fewer bugs.

Let’s continue with your processes. Getting ISO 9001 certified is a start, but it’s not the end. We’ve been ISO 9001 certified for 5 years, but standardization of internal processes is a never-ending endeavor. Onboarding new customers. Preparing training materials. Maintaining the knowledge base. Invoicing. Handling customer tickets. The list is endless.

The key thing about process standardization is to place efficiency above history and individual ways of work. That’s not always easy to communicate to your team, but it’s needed. And it’s yet another (ungrateful) role a founder must fill.

Abstention

In today’s world, there is a tool for everything. Not enough, there are thousands of tools for every problem. And all those tools fight for your attention through digital marketing, social media ads, and super-positive user reviews.

No wonder the problem resolution cycle often starts with “we need this tool to solve that problem.”

Wrong.

Tools are tactical elements. Strategy is about what you do, not about how you do things.

Strategically solving a problem in today’s world starts with figuring out a solution with the tools, the team, and the product you have.

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About Me

Growing a company 📈 in uncertain times 🔥🧨 is like running a marathon — it demands grit, strategy, and resilience.

As a tech entrepreneur 💻, active reserve officer 🪖, and father of three 👩👦👦, I share practical insights and write about entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management.

When I’m not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains 🏔 around Zermatt 🇨🇭.

Do you like this perspective? Here’s what you can do next:

📌 Back the signal, not the noise — authentic stories by a person, not AI.

📌 Go deeper with my eBooks — practical guides for tough times.

📌 Browse the full collection — all my writing, in one place. No paywall. Ever.

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