How KFC UK & Ireland transformed product work with Atlassian

Cooking up product practices fresh enough to feed thousands of customers

It takes more than a secret mix of spices to make KFC’s famous chicken. To feed hungry customers at 1,000+ UK and Ireland locations, dozens of business and technical teams must work together. 

KFC UK&I’s Digital department handles everything from customer support to in-restaurant menu screens. As online ordering has grown in popularity, so too has the workload these technical teams must manage. 

Before their Atlassian transformation, KFC UK&I’s product organization faced three interrelated challenges:

• Unbalanced product roadmap: Features dominated the conversation, while foundational reliability and scalability work would get pushed back until it created problems.

• Lack of visibility into component health and ownership visibility: Existing tooling didn’t flag issues like mounting tech debt and fragile components until it was too late, hurting system reliability. When issues occurred, response times were slowed as ops teams scrambled to identify the correct developers to address the problem.

• Brittle collaboration: Engineering and architecture teams felt like service desks, not stakeholders. They needed more reciprocal, fluid collaboration with other teams and business functions. 

“Over-focusing on short-term wins is like patching a roof when the foundation is compromised,” explains Ben Richards, Systemic Delivery Coach. “To endure, we need to rebalance. We needed a holistic, collaborative model to connect product and engineering work to company goals.”

The Digital department wasn’t new to Atlassian – tech teams had been using an Atlassian ecosystem for eight years: 

• Jira for delivery work tracking

• Bitbucket for developing and delivering code

• Confluence for documentation 

• Jira Service Management for incident management

“Atlassian tools help us deliver value to the customer by applying consistent standards to how we work,” says Ben. “But the primary benefit I keep coming back to is visibility. If you don't have visibility, you can't have meaningful conversations about customer needs and how to meet them.” 

The plan: from feature-factory teams to a product operating model

KFC UK&I’s Atlassian System of Work had served them well. But to elevate their product organization, they’d need to go further – evolving both how they work, and Atlassian tools they use to do so.

Ben and his team revolutionized how KFC UK+I collaborates, communicates, and prioritizes. They introduced a single prioritization framework for all product teams. They also invested in collaboration, building cross-functional teams and supporting relationships between them.

To translate these practices into action, they implemented the Atlassian DevOps Platform,a centralized software catalog, Jira Product Discovery, and Rovo.

An Atlassian toolset for a new product era

By helping teams communicate more freely and understand each others’ work, the Atlassian DevOp’s platform, including powerful tools like Jira Product Discovery, and Rovo, unite the organization around a shared vision for the product’s future. 

“Partnerships need visibility. To create visibility, we needed new tools,” says Ben. “Tools provide signals that guide attention and support timely action, helping us stay balanced. Who’s working on what, and what strategic purpose does it serve?” 

1. Improving team accountability and system reliability

Atlassian’s DevOps platform provides KFC UK&I engineering visibility so that all technical teams understand who is responsible for which components. “Before, product health visibility was scattered and wasn’t keeping work to our standards,” says Ben. “With Atlassian, we can tie defects and technical debt back to components themselves. That drives visibility and ownership within the team.” 

Health, ownership, dependencies and code for every software component are immediately visible in a centralized catalog of software components. “If I click on a component, I immediately see the Slack channels being used, the people involved, documentation in Confluence, Jira tickets, and Bitbucket repository,” says Ben.

Alerts automatically signal when components are at risk of dropping below KFC software health standards, integrating with security tools like SonarCloud and Snyk. Upon receiving an alert, teams can view the catalog to quickly identify the right individuals who can address it and navigate directly to the underlying code in Bitbucket to resolve.

2. Jira Product Discovery

Jira Product Discovery provides a shared space to discuss, experiment, and prioritize using KFC’s proprietary framework. “We chose Jira Product Discovery because it offers the flexibility to prioritize however we want,” says Ben.

Foundational engineering needs are visible alongside potential new features, making it easier to balance engineering investment. “It’s very rare that architectural engineers would have their own roadmap,” says Ben. “We’ve been able to distill their work alongside new features and upgrades into a true one-stop shop for planning.” 

Under the main project are sub-projects for each value stream, with an idea backlog and roadmap. Items are connected to the strategic goal they support, tagged with the team and stakeholders working on them, and linked to delivery work in Jira. 

Teams can update their own roadmaps, for example enriching ideas with customer insights. They can also view other teams’ roadmaps in their preferred view such as board, matrix, or timeline.

“Jira Product Discovery supports relationships and collaboration because we can present the same information in different ways that cater to the needs of the team viewing it,” explains Ben.

3. Rovo

With Rovo, teams can quickly answer questions by surfacing information from all three systems. “Rovo reduces noise, enables self-service, and helps teams find blind spots earlier,” says Ben. “It sees our entire Teamwork Graph, searches our collective knowledge, helping us surface broader connections, reduce mundane work, and automate intelligently.”

Outside of the search and chat functionality, KFC UK&I have also taken advantage of building custom agents in Rovo Studio, like their Architecture Review Agent. Previously, KFC UK&I's board of architects would have to spend time in roundtable discussions for all new software architecture proposals. No standards or guidelines were in place to ensure proposals were ready for review. To avoid these meetings that would delay the start of work or create additional, mundane tasks, KFC UK&I created this new agent. 

The agent reviews all new proposals for improving software architecture in response to a customer's need. The agent then provides initial feedback on KFC's existing guidelines and principles. Once a proposal is accepted, a second agent generates a Confluence page, following predetermined formatting standards.

Now, only the proposals  Rovo has ensured meet baseline guidelines and standardization are submitted to the board of architects for review, helping with prioritization and understanding of needs.

The team has also created a Change Agent to make changes more fluid and less restrictive. When it’s time to put out a new release, the team runs the agent that then sources all respective information using ticket data and Bitbucket. With this information, the agent compiles a release notice in a consistent output with the areas defined by the business. Once this is completed, the agent updates the change fields including risk, impact, and any associated services. 

This agent eliminates 90% of the previous overhead work needed to compile the overview and info, and acts like a teammate when it comes to validating and enabling the final submission. 

Equipping teams to serve customers for years and decades to come

With new practices and tools, KFC UK&I is confident in its Digital department’s resiliency and ability. As KFC grows and the restaurant industry shifts further online, they’ll keep putting the customer experience first. 

“Product strategy isn't just about building what's next – it's about investing in the system that sustains it,” says Ben. “Great products only emerge when workloads are balanced, teams are connected, and we have tools to guide our attention to where it counts.”