Long Suciu spent years building the toolchain that connected objectives to execution across more than 30 product teams at Gartner. In this segment of his conversation with Patrycja Radwanska on the Let’s Talk Operations series, he walks through how the organization moved from objectives in PowerPoint decks and epics in disorganized Jira projects to an integrated system where Productboard housed strategy and Jira handled execution – and how that integration made 70 product managers measurably more productive.
The Starting Point: Objectives in Slide Decks, Ideas in Jira Tickets
The problem Suciu inherited was one of altitude. Everyone was working in the wrong tool at the wrong level. Objectives and goals lived in slide decks that product managers would manually update, copy into other slide decks, and then present in monthly reviews that consumed hours of preparation for minutes of discussion. Meanwhile, Jira – which should have been reserved for execution – had become the dumping ground for everything: ideas, feature requests, half-formed concepts, and actual work items all mixed together in backlogs that grew without limit.
Product managers were spending their days deep in Jira tickets instead of thinking strategically about roadmaps. Epics were not organized packages of work tied to objectives. They were buckets. Things got thrown in. The connection between what the organization wanted to achieve and what teams were actually building existed only in the heads of a few individuals, and when those individuals moved roles or left the company, the connection disappeared entirely.
“Product managers should be strategic thinkers and be thinking about building roadmaps and coming up with ideas and being ideally more six to 12 months forward-looking versus day to day.”
The Tool Discovery: Quantive, Productboard, and the Consolidation
Suciu’s first attempt at solving the traceability problem was manual. Capture objectives in an Excel sheet. Map them to epics. He abandoned it quickly – with 70 product managers, nobody was going to maintain an Excel-to-Jira mapping by hand.
The tool discovery process led to two platforms. Quantive became the objective management platform – the place where OKRs would live. Productboard became the roadmap and product management platform – the place for ideas (things you could do but are not going to do yet) and roadmaps (things you are going to do). Jira remained the execution layer.
The architecture was logical. Objectives in Quantive. Roadmap items in Productboard, linked to epics in Jira. A single Jira ticket could be traced up through an epic to a roadmap item to an objective. The right people would work at the right altitude: VPs would look at objectives, product managers would work in Productboard, development teams would execute in Jira.
The reality was messier. Quantive never achieved the adoption Suciu needed. People did not want to log into yet another platform. The breakthrough came when Productboard introduced OKR support natively, which meant objectives and roadmaps could live in the same tool. The consolidation was transformative. Product managers could now associate objectives with features, and when a feature was ready to be built, a button push created the Jira epic directly from Productboard.
The Upstream Effect: A Cleaner Jira
The most unexpected benefit of the Productboard integration was what happened to Jira. It got cleaner. When ideas and roadmap items lived in Productboard, Jira stopped being the place where every thought got dumped as a ticket. Jira became representative of work that was actually going to happen – not everything that could happen, might happen, or once seemed like a good idea to someone who no longer worked at the company.
This had a cascading effect on team health. Backlogs shrank. The signal-to-noise ratio improved. Sprint planning became faster because there was less noise to wade through. And the product managers who had been spending their days in Jira – reviewing tickets, updating statuses, drowning in operational detail – could finally spend their time on strategy, ideas, and the six-to-twelve-month horizon that their role actually demanded.
Selling the Change: CTO Advocacy and Finding Champions
The adoption story is worth studying because it illustrates a pattern Suciu encounters repeatedly. The team-level sell was relatively straightforward: Productboard solves the problem of having ideas you do not want to lose and a roadmap you need to maintain, without creating an infinite backlog of Jira tickets. Product managers understood the value proposition immediately.
The objective management layer was harder. Getting senior leadership to use a system of record for OKRs instead of reviewing slide decks required CTO-level sponsorship. Suciu credits the CTO’s personal advocacy – working directly with the senior leadership team, directing them to Quantive (and later Productboard) to review objectives – as the tipping point. Without that top-down endorsement, the platform would have remained a tool used by enthusiasts and ignored by everyone else.
The other lever was finding internal champions. Suciu describes watching for signals – a product manager who had done OKRs at a previous company, someone who lights up when they see the feature set, a person whose enthusiasm would be contagious in exactly the parts of the organization that were most resistant. You add that person to the mix not because you planned to, but because you recognize the acceleration opportunity when it appears.
“If I get that person who’s done OKRs in another organization, who’s all about it, and I show them how they can put their OKRs here –”
The sentence trails off in the transcript, but the implication is clear. Adoption spreads through proof, not mandates. One enthusiastic champion in a skeptical product group is worth more than a dozen training sessions.
For the full interview breakdown, see our complete Expert Insight with Long Suciu.
Tools Mentioned in the Interview
The following tools and platforms were referenced during this conversation.
Related Content
Scaling Product Operations Without Breaking Teams: Expert Insights with Long Suciu
Long Suciu has spent 25 years redesigning how product and engineering teams plan, prioritize, and ship. He breaks down why story points are often the first thing to cut, how a six-week quarterly planning cadence brought alignment to 30+ teams at Gartner, and why tools must reinforce behavior rather than replace it.
Power BI Dashboards That Engineering Managers Actually Use
Long Suciu built Power BI dashboards from Jira data that engineering managers actually opened every morning. He explains the design principles -- readability, daily refresh, sprint goal visibility -- that made them work, and how backlog transparency led to the most productive archiving conversations of his career.
Why Dropping Story Points Is the First Move in Any Agile Transformation
Long Suciu explains why eliminating story points -- a practice used by 90% of software teams -- is often the single most productive shock to the system when transforming how teams plan and deliver.