How an open-source API client turned Jira into a public trust signal for 3M+ developers
Bruno is a fast-growing, open-source, Git-native API client used by millions of developers — from students and solo engineers to teams inside large enterprises. As Bruno scaled to 3M+ users and 44,000+ GitHub stars, managing community expectations and communicating product direction became as critical as shipping code itself.
By integrating Released — an Atlassian Marketplace app for public roadmaps, feedback portals, and AI-powered release notes — directly with their existing Jira workflows, Bruno transformed fragmented, ad hoc product updates into a structured, always-current communication system. The result was measurable: their roadmap and releases page became the 6th most-visited page on Bruno’s website, with the 2nd-highest engagement time per user — and a reputation for transparency that gives Bruno a competitive edge against vendors many times its size.
The Challenge
Open-source products live and die by community confidence. For Bruno, that meant one question surfaced constantly across GitHub issues, Discord channels, and social media: “What’s next?”
With 4M+ users and a passionate, vocal community spanning solo developers, professional engineering teams, and enterprise organisations, Bruno’s challenge wasn’t building a great product — it was making that progress visible in a way that felt intentional, durable, and connected to real work.
A public-facing roadmap was the obvious answer. But where should it live, and what form should it take? A newsletter could share updates, but newsletters are ephemeral — great for a moment, gone from view the next day. A standalone document could capture a snapshot, but keeping it current required manual effort that quickly fell out of sync with the pace of development. Neither felt right for a community that expected transparency as a continuous experience, not a periodic announcement.
The real question was one of connection. Bruno’s engineering team was already doing the work in Jira — tracking issues, managing releases, sequencing priorities. What they needed was a way to selectively surface that work to their users: not everything, but the right things, presented in a clean and easily digestible format that non-technical users could engage with as naturally as engineers could. The gap wasn’t in the work being done — it was in finding a way to translate that work into something their community could follow, trust, and return to.
For a product competing against vendors many times its size, solving that gap wasn’t just a communications nice-to-have. A visible, maintained roadmap had become a signal of legitimacy — something enterprise evaluators expected to see before committing, and something the community needed to stay confident in Bruno’s direction.
Why Atlassian + Released
Rather than building a bespoke status site or layering in yet another standalone tool, Bruno turned to the Atlassian Ecosystem: using Jira as their core system of work, extended by Released – a Marketplace solution purpose-built for public roadmaps, release communication, and customer feedback.
Released was founded by ex-Atlassians Jens Schumacher and Adam Ahmed, with a singular focus on leveling up customer communication. For Bruno, the appeal was straightforward: Released sits natively alongside Jira rather than duplicating it, turning existing issues and releases into a polished, user-facing experience with minimal additional overhead. Product and engineering teams could configure and maintain the public roadmap entirely within Jira — preserving existing workflows and eliminating context-switching. And as a vetted Atlassian Marketplace partner, Released carried a transparent trust and security posture that allowed Bruno to adopt it with confidence.
This is the Atlassian Ecosystem working as intended: not replacing what teams already trust, but composing on top of it — extending the value of Jira into a complete communication system without asking teams to start over.
The Solution
Bruno implemented Released as the backbone of a new product communication strategy, built directly on top of their existing Jira environment.
The setup was, by Bruno’s own account, “wildly easy.” The public roadmap and release hub was live in hours, not weeks — with all configuration handled inside Jira. The team could cherry-pick which issues and epics appeared publicly, group updates into coherent releases, and keep the roadmap current in real time as work progressed, without ever leaving their existing tooling.
But the impact of implementing Released went deeper than adding a new page to Bruno’s website. It became a forcing function for internal discipline. To publish a roadmap, Bruno first had to define one — driving cross-functional alignment on priorities, sequencing, and messaging that had previously been implicit or informal. Monthly releases evolved into a structured internal ceremony: what are the most important things to surface this month, and why? That cadence created accountability inside the team (“we said we’d ship this”) and predictability outside it (“Bruno reliably tells us what’s new and what’s next”).
Instead of fielding repetitive questions across Discord, GitHub, and social channels, Bruno now directs users to one authoritative, always-current destination — a single source of truth that reflects real work, maintained with the same discipline as the codebase itself.
Results
Released helped Bruno turn Jira-based work into a durable, public-facing narrative of progress — and the impact shows up across both internal operations and external engagement.
Internally, the discipline of maintaining a public roadmap drove clearer agreement across product and engineering on what was in scope, what wasn’t, and why. What began as a response to user demand became a stable operating rhythm: define, build, curate, communicate — all within a single, integrated system. The team spends less time fielding repetitive status questions and more time shipping the work that answers them.
Externally, the numbers speak for themselves. Bruno’s roadmap and releases page is now the 6th most-visited page on their website (excluding the homepage), with the 2nd-highest engagement time per user across all site pages. Visitors don’t just glance — they read, explore, and come back. The page ranks 3rd in views per user, reflecting strong repeat visitation as users track progress over time. And compared with many comparable open-source peers, Bruno sees 10x the roadmap traffic volume — evidence that their community treats this page as a critical evaluation and trust signal, not a supplementary resource.
Within Bruno’s community, the roadmap hub has become one of the most referenced surfaces in how users talk about the product. Customers cite it in Discord discussions, share it with colleagues evaluating Bruno for enterprise use, and return to it regularly to confirm that the team is delivering on its promises. For a company much smaller than many of its competitors, that kind of consistent, visible progress — maintained and public — provides something that marketing alone cannot: confidence, clarity, and legitimacy.
Our public roadmap is a core trust surface for Bruno. Users check it to understand where the product is going and whether we’re following through on what we say.”
Bruno team
Key Takeaways
Bruno’s story carries lessons that extend well beyond their specific context. For any software team navigating the challenge of scaling community trust, the experience surfaces four durable principles.
First, transparency is a product feature, not a marketing exercise. A well-maintained public roadmap directly influences user confidence, repeat engagement, and competitive differentiation — particularly for teams competing against larger, better-resourced vendors. Bruno’s traffic and engagement data makes this concrete: users don’t just appreciate the roadmap, they depend on it.
Second, integration beats addition. By extending Jira with a Marketplace app rather than adopting a separate communication platform, Bruno preserved existing workflows, reduced overhead, and kept their roadmap permanently in sync with actual work. The result is a communication system that stays current not because someone updates it manually, but because it’s connected to the source of truth.
Third, structure creates discipline. The process of publishing a public roadmap forced Bruno to align internally on priorities and sequencing — delivering operational benefits that extended well beyond the external-facing result. In this case, the customer-facing output made the internal process better, not just more visible.
Finally, the Atlassian Ecosystem’s knack for composition enables scale. Bruno demonstrates how organizations can compose Atlassian products and Marketplace partners into a connected system of work that delivers outcomes — in this case, community trust and product legitimacy — that neither tool could achieve alone. That’s the Atlassian Ecosystem in action: not a collection of products, but a connected, intelligent orchestration of tools on an underlying platform that gets more powerful when its pieces work together.
About Released
Released is an Atlassian Marketplace solution for feedback portals, public roadmaps, changelogs, and AI-powered release notes. Founded by ex-Atlassians, Released integrates natively with Jira to help software teams turn internal work into clear, credible external communication — without leaving the tools they already use.
View Released on the Atlassian Marketplace →
About Bruno
Bruno is a fast, Git-native API client built for developers who want a simpler, more reliable workflow. It stores collections directly on your filesystem using plain text, works fully offline, and integrates naturally with version control — making collaboration, review, and automation significantly easier than traditional cloud-first API tools. Bruno is open-source, privacy-focused, and designed to stay lightweight as teams scale.
