Strategic Portfolio Management Is Critical in Today’s Fast Moving Environment
Today’s market moves fast. To stay competitive, companies need to continually evaluate, align and adjust strategy, roadmap, and execution so that investments are both planned and delivered to accelerate business outcomes and gain a competitive stronghold. This is where strategic portfolio management or SPM, and tools like Atlassian Strategy Collection with Jira Align and Dragonboat come in. While both aim to connect teams to top-level objectives, they differ extensively in platform approach, supported personas, operational impacts, and time to value.
Let’s explore the differences.
About Atlassian Strategy Collection with Jira Align
The Atlassian Strategy Collection is a newcomer in the SPM space via an extension of a legacy platform.
In early 2025, Atlassian launched Strategy Collection as a separate product suite from Team Collection. The Strategy collection consists of Focus, Talent (Beta), and Jira Align.
- Focus is a newly launched product,
- Talent is still in beta (as of July 2025),
- They both rely on the core platform: Jira Align, previously known as Agile Craft, a SAFe-based portfolio platform that came to market in 2013.
While Atlassian Strategy Collection looks great on paper and marketing, it’s been proven to be extremely limiting in practice, especially for modern product operating models.
It’s built upon a rigid foundation, focusing primarily on the PMO persona, and disconnected from the product management solution (aka Jira Product Discovery), as of July 2025.
The Challenges with Atlassian’s Strategy Collection/ Jira Align
#1.) Rigid Frameworks That Hurt Team Autonomy
The Jira Align platform is created around text book SAFe (scaled agile framework) and requires full standardization across the organization. This undermines team autonomy and creativity, two things high-performing product teams rely on. It’s designed for command-and-control PMOs, not empowered cross-functional product teams.
#2.) Ironically, Weak Integration with Jira
Despite its name, Jira Align doesn’t integrate seamlessly with Jira. As a bolt-on acquisition (formerly AgileCraft), it imposes an inflexible data model that often breaks down with real-world Jira workflows. The result? Manual workarounds, sync errors, and frustration.
#3.) Long, Costly Implementations
Jira Align requires months of onboarding, process change, operational change, expensive consulting, and ongoing maintenance. It’s hard to configure, harder to adapt, and nearly impossible to evolve as your product operating model evolves. You end up locked into a rigid structure that no longer fits your needs.
#4.) High Cost, High Overhead
To make it work, often requires a dedicated PMO to manage the platform and ongoing changes, ultimately driving up both cost and complexity.
#5.) Beta Products Lead to High Change Management and Hidden Business Costs
Both Focus and Talent are brand new capabilities in brand new areas for Atlassian, which introduces many operating risks to their customers. Companies adopting these new/ beta products/ modules seem to have an all-in-one solution, but instead, there are lots of gaps in these new products, which will inevitably lead to major changes in products, and subsequently FORCE their customers to educate their users and roll out change management constantly, creating huge opportunity costs that are often invisible.
#6.) Intelligence Is an After Thought With Insight Product as an Extra Add-On
Rather than being embedded, Atlassian’s insights product requires additional licensing, adding to the total cost while creating a fragmented data and complex user experience.
#7.) The Product Management Solution Is Disconnected From the Strategy Collection
Strategy Collection is separate from product, which further expands the gap between strategy and roadmap, defeating the purpose to a large extent of having a strategy collection.
If you’re evaluating Jira Align or struggling with its limitations, here’s why many fast-moving organizations are choosing Dragonboat as a modern, flexible alternative.
Why Dragonboat Is the Modern Alternative to Strategy Collection/ Jira Align
Dragonboat is built from the ground up for today’s dynamic product operating model. It’s a Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) platform that connects strategy, planning, and delivery, without slowing teams down.
Here’s what sets Dragonboat apart:
#1.) Data and Intelligence First
Effective decisions rely on quality contextual updated data. Dragonboat’s modern strategic portfolio management data graph is designed to fit and adapt to your unique, evolving product operating model and ontology. It’s deeply integrated, with contextual mapping and transformation between adjacent systems, to provide a real-time, holistic layer of Portfolio Intelligence for AI and human users to gain real-time visibility, insights, and recommendations.
Hear firsthand why outcome focused teams choose Dragonboat.
#2.) It’s Flexible
Dragonboat adapts to how your teams work, not the other way around. It supports varied planning cadences, hybrid frameworks, and custom configurations, so you can evolve your operating model without rigid constraints.
#3.) It’s Scalable
For companies that came together via M&A (mergers and acquisitions), companies with 10s of 1000s product engineers, or companies with global presences, Dragonboat can be easily configured to support uneven styles of working, and adapt as more product or business units or companies are added to the portfolio of portfolios.
#4.) It’s Proven
Both enterprises and fast-growing scaling companies use Dragonboat to orchestrate product operating models and accelerate strategy and delivery.
#5.) Contextual, Deep Jira Integration
Dragonboat syncs bidirectionally with Jira (and ADO), preserving team workflows while giving leaders full visibility. It brings delivery data into strategic context without requiring teams to change how they work.
#6.) Fast Time to Value
Get up and running in weeks, not months. Dragonboat is intuitive, configurable, and doesn’t require an army of consultants. As your organization evolves, Dragonboat evolves with you.
“We wanted a Portfolio Management tool that integrates well in Jira, offers clear visualizations and capacity management, but we also wanted to find an organization with a great culture that matches ours, that is growing, and that we could grow along with.”
– Aaron Hall, VP of Portfolio & Project Management and Chief of Staff at CARFAX
#7.) AI-Powered Portfolio Intelligence
With Dragonboat’s AI-native architecture, you get real-time insights into delivery risks, dependencies, and resourcing tradeoffs—so you can course-correct fast and maximize business impact.
How To Choose the Right Platform To Align and Adjust Strategy, Investment, and Execution
Depending on how you want your organization to operate, you’d choose the tool that best fits your needs.
If you operate in a static environment, not on a product focused operating model (aka project based), have adopted Jira Align enterprise-wide with great success, and have a large workforce of PMO or consultant dedicated to constant process change management as Atlassian Strategy Collection beta modules are being built, you may prefer Atlassian Strategy Collection with Jira Align.
But if you find that any of the following is true, then a modern SPM platform like Dragonboat is the right choice for you:
- SPM should be for companies of all sizes, not just large, slow-moving enterprises
- SPM should connect with product management and customer insights, not just link work and plan headcount
- SPM should start with connecting data and context, not start with forced process change
- SPM should work for many ways of working, not just for SAFe
- SPM should be easily adapted for your evolving teams and practices, not restricted after long implementation
- SPM should enable value at many levels and roles, including both executives, PMs, Ops, and not just for PMOs.
Modern organizations need a flexible, scalable, and AI native Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) platform where everyone in a product operating model can leverage to make decisions that accelerate outcomes. Dragonboat is the modern alternative to the Jira Align / Atlassian Strategic Collection.
