From silos to synergy: How Kerrie Gottschalk unified AAFP’s marketing team with Jira

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💬 Want to share your story? Atlassian is eager to learn how your team utilizes Jira to enhance marketing, sales, design, or other business initiatives. Whether you’re overseeing content production, monitoring customer interactions, or managing creative requests, we invite you to share your success!

👉 Drop a comment on this page telling us about your team’s success story, and we will reach out if your experience inspires us!

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American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) is one of the largest national medical organizations, representing over 128,000 members across the United States and internationally. With a staff of 340, the AAFP is committed to promoting and upholding high-quality standards for family physicians. This includes developing and endorsing clinical practice guidelines, engaging in policy discussions with state and federal governments, and undertaking various initiatives to ensure comprehensive healthcare for the public.

As the Testing and Quality Assurance (QA) Manager in IT and Atlassian Administrator, @Kerrie Gottschalk is responsible for planning and organizing testing protocols, managing the QA team, and overseeing the governance and management of Atlassian products. Recently, Kerrie successfully onboarded AAFP’s marketing department onto Jira, transforming how teams work together and deliver value to the organization.

🚩 Misalignment, miscommunication, and missed deadlines

The marketing department, comprising approximately 75 members, encountered considerable challenges in project management. Their activities encompassed a broad spectrum – from campaign planning and content creation to digital analytics and member engagement. However, in the absence of a centralized system, teams recorded their efforts in isolated spreadsheets or separate Jira projects. This fragmented approach hindered effective collaboration, particularly on cross-functional campaigns. Teams often operated in silos, unaware of overlapping efforts or shifting priorities. Consequently, deadlines were frequently missed, messaging became inconsistent, and duplicative work arose – wasting valuable time and resources. The lack of a unified workflow not only impeded productivity but also complicated the delivery of cohesive, timely campaigns that aligned with organizational goals.

💥 Leadership recognizes the need for change

In March 2024, a major reorganization prompted an initiative, led by Kerrie and the AAFP PMO team, to review marketing and communications workflows and find a solution that would increase efficiency and bring all teams together in a single workspace. As a long-time advocate and power user of Jira, Kerrie recommended Jira as the primary project management tool for the organization. The VP of AAFP Communications became the champion for this initiative, ensuring buy-in across all teams.

🎯 Jira becomes the single source of truth 

Within the marketing department, smaller teams focused on various projects and initiatives. To facilitate the transition to Jira, Kerrie, in collaboration with her PMO counterpart, met with each team to gain a comprehensive of how teams were actually working. By examining real-life processes, they sought to convert as many elements as possible into customized Jira work items and workflows, thereby minimizing friction and enhancing adoption.

However, creating custom fields and work items for each team proved to be a labor-intensive and time-consuming endeavor. Kerrie navigated multiple rounds of builds, reviews, and testing with each working group to develop functional Jira work items and workflows for each group. She sought input from the teams to ensure that the final product was something they desired – something genuinely useful.

Once the work items were refined based on team feedback, Kerrie and her PMO counterpart conducted various training sessions and workshops to assist the team in becoming proficient at tracking their work in Jira. The workshops took several forms: first, a hybrid overview session (both in-person and via video meeting) that addressed the ‘why’ and ‘how’ for all attendees, which was recorded for those unable to participate; second, individual team training sessions to review the build and create test work items; and finally, scheduled open-office hours for anyone to drop in with questions or seek support. The open office hours were conducted weekly for several months and now occur once a month.

After nine months of developing the solution for each team within the marketing department, Kerrie established a go-live date. This duration was unusually lengthy for a project of this nature, as new project builds typically take one to two months to complete. However, due to the complexity, scale, and necessity to consolidate several Jira projects into one, this extended timeline was essential. This moment signified the point at which the entire marketing department would collectively discontinue the use of any previous project management tools and fully transition to Jira, thereby ensuring business continuity.

🤝 How Jira simplifies collaboration for AAFP’s marketing team

Today, the marketing team at AAFP effectively utilizes a robust Jira instance to manage a diverse array of activities, ranging from member communications to campaign management.

• Standardized Process: Each campaign plan is now developed in Confluence using a standardized campaign template. A tactical plan is integrated, and Jira tickets are generated from this plan.

• Single Source of Truth: When all team members adhere to a uniform process, individuals understand what to expect when opening a new Jira work item. Each work item encompasses the essential information required for execution, thereby eliminating the need for individuals to repeatedly request additional information.

• Full Visibility Across the Organization: With the marketing team utilizing Jira, marketing leads and senior leaders can now effectively monitor the progress of all ongoing and upcoming campaigns. As of June 2025, there are 380 campaigns at various stages of development.

💙 Kerrie’s top tips for for driving adoption of Jira

• Listen first, build second: Kerrie dedicated time to thoroughly understand each team's workflow before developing solutions. This approach not only helped her visualize the necessary configurations but also ensured the solutions would be genuinely useful to the teams.

• Understanding Cross-Team Relationships: Effective collaboration among teams is essential. It is crucial to not only grasp the internal dynamics of a single team but also to comprehend how they interact with other teams and the nature of their collaborative efforts.

• Include teams in the process: Teams actively participated in working sessions, builds, and reviews, and were encouraged to experiment in a sandbox environment. For many, this was the first time they were asked about their actual work processes. This inclusive strategy fostered a sense of ownership and enthusiasm, facilitating smoother adoption.

• Communicate, and over-communicate: Kerrie and her team employed a variety of communication channels to inform the organization about the upcoming changes. They utilized town halls, MS Teams, Confluence, and in-person meetings to explain the “how” and “when” of the transition, starting six weeks before the go-live date. This proactive communication helped prepare everyone for the impending change.

• Secure executive sponsorship: Gaining leadership support was crucial. It lent credibility to Kerrie's efforts and reduced resistance. Teams were more willing to collaborate with her and embrace change, knowing she had the backing of senior leaders. Transitioning to Jira fundamentally altered everyone's workflow, making it essential for staff to see that leaders were championing this change.

• Bring in a neutral third-party: Kerrie and her team engaged an independent consultant to facilitate the cultural changes necessary for the successful adoption of Jira throughout the organization. By acting as a neutral third party, the consultant alleviated some of the pressure on Kerrie, making challenging discussions about the reasons for change more manageable.

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🔍 Take a closer look at Kerrie’s workflow

Kerrie created customized workflows to accommodate the various types of work within the marketing department.

Example: Teams conducting campaigns will employ the following workflow. When the campaign ticket (in this case, an Epic) is transitioned to In Progress, the tactical work has been carefully organized and is ready for execution.

Here’s what a Jira work item for a campaign might look like. Child work items are the campaign deliverables.

Kerrie’s marketing team employs over 35 automations to propel their work forward.

Example: The Core Content Team leverages a number of automations to generate related sub-tasks based on the primary content deliverable.

Trigger: Issue Transition

• When: An issue transitions from "To Do" to "Draft".

• And issue type = Core Content

• Then: The rule is activated.

Smart Variables Created

These variables are extracted from the issue fields:

1. webPageType ← from custom field

2. mktDueDate ← from custom field

3. mktAudience ← from custom field

Issue Refresh

• The issue is refreshed to ensure the latest data is used.

If/Else condition

If Condition:

• Primary Content Deliverable is "Newsletter (AAFP News, FFM, etc.)"

Actions:

1. Create Web Page Sub-task

   • Summary: Web page: {{issue.summary}}

   • Description: copied from original issue

   • In-Market/Launch Date: {{mktDueDate}}

   • Web Page Type: copied from original issue

   • Reporter: copied from original issue

2. Create Social Media Sub-task

   • Summary: Social Media {{issue.summary}}

   • Description: copied from original issue

   • Promotion Start Date: {{mktDueDate}}

   • Reporter: copied from original issue

Else

Condition:

• Primary Content Deliverable is "News Story" or "Blog"

Actions:

1. Create Web Page sub-task

2. Create Social Media sub-task

3. Create Email Insert sub-task

   • Summary: Email insert: {{issue.summary}}

   • Description: copied from original issue

   • Promotion Start Date: {{mktDueDate}}

   • Content Heading: set to "Placeholder text"

   • Reporter: copied from original issue