Steering, Not Just Sprinting: Delight as the Strategic Layer on Top of Jira & Friends
Working with data and AI is more than building models or pipelines. It also involves making the right investments at the right time and ensuring those initiatives create measurable value.
For Data Product Managers, this means not only delivering on time but deciding what’s actually worth doing in the first place.
In many teams, task management tools have become the default interface for organizing work. From Jira and Asana to Trello, monday.com, Linear, and Azure DevOps, these platforms offer robust ways to align sprints, track progress, and coordinate team activity.
And they do a great job of it.
But when it comes to managing the lifecycle of data products and steering a high-impact portfolio, the challenge starts long before tasks hit the backlog. What business problem are we solving? Which idea has the highest strategic fit? What’s the potential value? And how do we track the value across time?
These are the questions that task management tools weren’t built to answer. And that’s where Delight comes in.
The value of task management tools
Let’s be clear: tools like Jira and Azure DevOps exist for good reason. They help teams break work into manageable tasks, assign responsibilities, and ensure execution runs smoothly. They even generate useful insights for team leads to identify process bottlenecks and workload imbalances. Naturally, teams rely on them for everything from sprint planning to delivery tracking and they’ve become the operational backbone of agile software development.
And organizations buy them for exactly those reasons: to manage backlogs, facilitate team collaboration, communicate progress, and streamline development operations.
But here's the catch: working with data is not only about delivery.
Why Delight is different
While task management software shines in execution, Delight focuses on something else entirely: strategic decision-making in data & AI. It's not aboutmanaging to-do lists, it's about managing the why behind every use case.
Delight gives Data Product Managers a dedicated space to:
All before anything gets scoped or assigned.
It help steams build and evolve a portfolio of data and AI initiatives, not just deliver features. With Delight, teams can trace value attribution, manage use case lifecycles, and identify synergies across departments or products.
Where task management tools focus on "doing things right," Delight ensures you're "doing the right things".
What Task Managers can’t do
Jira and friends were never designed to handle the ambiguity and non-linearity of data work. They don’t guide strategic scoping. They don’t evaluate business impact. They don’t tell you whether an idea is worth pursuing or how it connects to broader business goals.
And while many of these tools offer extensive customization options, they tend to become overly complex in data contexts. The result? Overloaded boards, unclear value tracking, and teams working on things without knowing why they matter.
Delight, by contrast, stays simple and focused. It serves as a source of truth for PMs managing data products, enabling them to prioritize confidently, communicate clearly, and measure impact over time.
Not either-or, but always better together
Of course, some might ask: “Why not just customize Jira to include a few portfolio fields?” Or “Do we really need another tool?”
And honestly, in small teams or early-stage setups, it’s a fair question. With some effort, you can tweak task management tools to kind of resemble a portfolio. But the result is often clunky and hard to maintain, especially as initiatives grow in number and complexity.
Delight doesn’t replace Jira, or any other task tool. It complements them. It provides the strategic layer above task execution. While task management software organizes delivery and operations, Delight manages the why of the data portfolio – before the work begins and long after it's been shipped.
Together, they form a complete stack: strategy → execution → impact.
Final thought
So here we are: Task Management Software lining up tickets and deadlines, and Delight helping decide which bets are actually worth placing. It’s a perfect match, assuming your team still wants to work on the right problems, not just the right epics.
But hey, if your backlog is your strategy, maybe you don’t need Delight after all.
Just wondering.
But if you’re interested to see Delight in action, book a demo or start your 14-day trial today.
