TillyGen and Jira

What this is about

Jira runs product organizations: issues, sprints, boards, and a reporting culture built around ticket status. Video requests arrive there too — a launch video for Q3, a tutorial series for the new feature — and product managers expect to track them like any other work. The workable split: each production is an epic or issue with status and links, the request intake stays in Jira, and the actual production plan — scenes, shots, shooting days, call sheets — lives in TillyGen. Jira's CSV import can create the work breakdown as sub-tasks once the plan exists.

An integration is good when nobody talks about it any more: the data is where it is needed and nobody exports anything.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• The video request enters as a Jira issue; its description links the TillyGen brief, so scope questions have a home outside comment threads
• Jira's CSV import turns the work breakdown from TillyGen into sub-tasks — phases and deliverables, mapped to assignees and due dates
• Sprint ceremonies see ticket status; the schedule PDF attached to the epic explains what the shoot days actually contain
• Issue keys in commit-message style — VIDEO-42 — give every production a handle the whole org can reference

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Accept the video request as a Jira issue and answer the scope questions in TillyGen — the brief there becomes the issue's linked source of truth.
2. Plan the production in TillyGen until shot list and schedule stand; the issue stays in an 'in planning' status meanwhile.
3. Export the work breakdown as CSV and import it into Jira as sub-tasks under the epic, with due dates from the schedule.
4. Attach the schedule PDF to the epic before sprint review, so status questions get answered by the plan instead of by improvisation.
5. Keep ticket status and plan in step: a shoot day moved in TillyGen updates the sub-task dates the same day.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Planning by comment: shot decisions negotiated in Jira threads never reach the shot list, and the shoot follows a plan that ignores them
• Sub-tasks cut finer than the plan — fifty shot tickets whose statuses say nothing the schedule does not already say better
• The epic shows 'done' while delivery files are still rendering, because ticket culture rewards closing over finishing

With TillyGen

Jira tracks that the production happens; TillyGen determines how. The issue links the brief, the sub-tasks descend from the plan's CSV, and no shot decision is ever made in a comment field.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.