Kishore Anand Venkatarajulu — Product & Delivery Case Studies

I'm a delivery/project professional transitioning into product management. Below are things I've identified, designed, and shipped myself — not just specced for someone else to build. Each one started as a real operational pain point I sat close enough to actually fix.

Story Point Reconciler — an internal Jira app that made engineering effort visible and replaced monthly manual reporting

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Built with: Python, Jira REST API, Atlassian Forge

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Problem

At Xoxoday, engineering broke every story into Dev tasks, and story points lived on the tasks, not the parent story. At sprint-end we needed completed story points and our highest-scope initiatives, but Jira had no native way to roll task points up to their parent stories.

Who Felt It

CTO: needed scope data to identify key initiatives.
QA and Dev leads: 2 QA engineers and a Dev lead spent about 2 working days each month (roughly 6-8 hours of focused effort) per product opening stories, summing linked tasks, verifying points, updating the parent, and logging comments. One product alone had around 1,000 stories and improvements in a monthly sprint.

Alternatives Considered

Manual reconciliation (what we did first): accurate when done carefully, but slow, error-prone, and always a step behind.
Jira’s native features and the Atlassian marketplace: nothing matched how we worked.
Jira Premium: would likely have covered it, but would have roughly doubled our existing Jira spend. Not worth it for this one gap.

What I Built

A reconciler using the Jira REST API. On a schedule, it scans every story and improvement, sums linked task points, updates the parent, and logs a comment for traceability. I first ran it as a local script, then researched Atlassian Forge, tested it internally, and migrated and installed it org-wide as Jira admin so it ran unattended. I iterated on it with team feedback up to v2.8.0.

Story Point Reconciler installed org-wide via Atlassian Forge, v2.8.0 (live until [July 2026]).

Decision and trade-off

I chose to build rather than pay for Premium: it cost me build time instead of recurring spend. The cost of that choice was ownership. A bought tool comes with a vendor, but mine had only me.