How to Take Meeting Notes with JIRA and Fellow

The ability to take exceptional meeting notes is an essential component of successful teams. Investing time and effort into taking comprehensive meeting notes will help ensure accountability, track progress, and help you and your teammates make more informed decisions. So how can you take more comprehensive meeting notes? The simple answer is by taking meeting notes with Jira and Fellow. Combining these two tools will help you boost efficiency and increase transparency. Interested in learning more? Keep reading to learn how to take meeting notes with Jira and Fellow! 

• What is Jira?
• What is Fellow?
• How to integrate Fellow and Jira?
• Best practices for taking meeting notes with Fellow and Jira
• Strategies for sharing meeting notes
• Examples of successful meeting notetaking with Jira and Fellow

What is Jira? 

Jira is an issue-tracking product developed by Atlassian that enables tracking and agile project management. Jira can be used to track project progress and tasks as they move through the development cycle. With Jira, you can also customize your workflows, collaborate, and ultimately release great software. As one of the most popular open-source testing software tools, Jira is trusted by over 65,000 companies worldwide, including a few notable mentions like Spotify, Cisco, eBay, Square, and Airbnb.

This issue-tracking tool is mainly used to track, organize, and prioritize issues, bugs, features, and tasks related to software and mobile apps. Jira offers pricing and plans that cater to teams of all sizes, including a free plan for 10 users or fewer and a premium plan for $15.25 per month for organizations that want to scale how they collaborate and track work.

What is Fellow?  

Fellow is an all-encompassing meeting management platform that strives to help users drive engagement and productivity by building better meeting habits before, during, and after every meeting. Coined as your one-stop shop for meeting agendas, action items, and feedback, Fellow helps users build better meeting habits and run more effective meetings with collaborative meeting agendas, real-time notetaking, and time-saving templates.

With Fellow you can keep track of work interactions and feedback over time, collaborate on meeting agendas before every one-on-one meeting, assign clear action items and takeaways at the end of each meeting, and centralize action items from different meetings in one personal to-do list.

How to integrate Fellow and Jira? 

With Fellow, you can create, import, and manage Jira issues easily in one place. This Jira integration in Fellow makes it possible to manage existing workflows in Jira with more granular capabilities that can only be accessed in Fellow, empowering you to take your project management game to the next level. To integrate Fellow and Jira, simply visit your Workspace settings in Fellow and select Integrations. From here, select the Jira Card. You’ll now be redirected to Fellow’s page in the Atlassian Marketplace where you’ll be prompted to move forward. From here, you can jump right in and start creating and importing issues from Jira!

Best practices for taking meeting notes with Fellow and Jira 

• Prepare ahead of time
• Use a consistent format
• Focus on action items
• Listen carefully
• Avoid word-for-word transcription

1Prepare ahead of time

The key to hosting a productive meeting is preparation. This means taking the time to review the meeting agenda and reviewing any necessary materials before the meeting. Prepping in advance will help you stay focused during the meeting while ensuring you can capture all necessary information. It’s important that you enter the meeting informed and ready to participate. 

2Use a consistent format

Using a consistent note-taking format will help you stay organized both during the meeting and after. Using a similar format from one meeting to the next will ensure the note-taking process is streamlined and efficient. Not only will it make it easier to take notes during the meeting, but it will also simplify your search for important information at a later date. To keep things simple, consider using bullet points or a  numbered format to keep track of key information. 

3Focus on action items

Every great meeting ends with clear and concise action items, so it’s important to capture action items when notetaking. When transcribing action items during a meeting, make sure to clearly note who is responsible for each task as well as when the task must be completed. Leveraging Jira to keep track of action items is a great way to stay on top of them while holding your teammates accountable. 

Connecting Jira with Fellow means you will never lose track of issues that come up during meetings! Simply turn action items generated in fellow into Jira issues so their completion status stays in sync between both tools. With Fellow’s Jira integration, you can seamlessly turn action items into Jira issues so nothing falls through the cracks because it wasn’t accounted for in your issue-tracking software. 

4Listen carefully

To be an effective notetaker, you need to practice active listening. Active listening while acting as a notetaker will require you to pay close attention to everything that is happening during the meeting. In addition to paying attention to the speaker, you should ensure you’re taking detailed notes by documenting key decisions or points made during the discussion. To take detailed notes, you need to remain engaged for the duration of the meeting. To avoid distractions, mute any unnecessary notifications and find a quiet, professional space from which you can work. 

5Avoid word-for-word transcription

While you may be tempted to try to capture every word that’s said during a meeting, this approach can be overwhelming and time-consuming. It also won’t serve you or your teammates in the future when it comes time to source information regarding key points or decisions. Instead, consider only capturing the main ideas and key takeaways. To make it easier to source information in the future, consider leveraging Fellow’s tag feature to highlight key items, organize content, and find what you’re looking for in a matter of seconds. 

Strategies for sharing meeting notes

After you’ve taken your meeting notes, it’s important to share them with all relevant stakeholders. Consider these strategies to share your meeting notes more effectively. 

• Determine the best method of sharing
• Summarize key points
• Share action items

1Determine the best method of sharing

When sharing your meeting notes, it’s important to consider your teammates’ communication styles and leverage tools with which your team is likely familiar. This may entail sharing meeting notes by email, through a messaging platform like Slack, or a collaborative tool like Jira or Fellow. Fellow eliminates the need to share meeting notes altogether by empowering users to create a collaborative meeting agenda that can be accessed by meeting attendees at all times! Not only does this help centralize information, but it also eliminates an extra step that you would need to take should you choose to share information manually.

2Summarize key points

When sharing your meeting notes, you may want to consider summarizing all key points and decisions. This will help ensure that stakeholders understand the main takeaways from the meeting. This summary will also save you and your teammates time when you go to review important information. 

Looking to organize key points and takeaways with ease? Fellow Streams has you covered. From personal to-do lists to team OKRs, Streams are digital notepads where action items and ideas combine to foster productivity. With Streams, you can easily organize and prioritize your tasks while keeping track of all key points discussed during the meeting. 

3Share action items

Sharing action items is a must. When sharing action items, make sure to clearly state who is responsible for each task as well as when it must be completed. This will help avoid any confusion or miscommunication down the road. 

Fellow makes it simple to foster accountability by sharing action items to make sure everyone knows who’s doing what as soon as the meeting finishes. With Fellow, you can assign, organize, and prioritize all your meeting action items in one place, making it possible for you and your teammates to focus on your most pressing tasks. 

Examples of successful meeting notetaking with Jira and Fellow

• Using Jira to track action items
• Collaborating on meeting notes in Fellow
• Using Fellow to create meeting agendas

1Using Jira to track action items

Project managers can use Jira to create a task for each action item that was assigned during a meeting. This action allows team members to easily track their progress and makes it possible for project managers or people managers to ensure that no tasks are falling through the cracks. Assigning action items through Jira during your meetings will ensure each one of your teammates is held accountable. 

2Collaborating on meeting notes in Fellow

Sales meetings can be quite extensive, meaning it’s imperative to take notes and keep track of key insights and takeaways. Sales teams can leverage Fellow to collaborate on meeting notes after a client meeting. This will allow them to easily share their notes and ensure they are all on the same page after the meeting. Meeting notes can also be referenced at a later date, helping to centralize important information that may be needed in the future. 

3Using Fellow to create meeting agendas

Marketing teams can use Fellow to create a comprehensive meeting agenda before their weekly meetings. This will allow them to stay focused during their weekly check-ins while ensuring they’ve discussed all pertinent topics. In addition, Fellow also allows users to create collaborative meeting agendas, meaning the marketing team can collaborate on a meeting agenda to ensure everyone has the opportunity to share pertinent information. 

Are you ready to take Jira meeting notes like a pro? 

Learning to take effective meeting notes with Jira and Fellow will help you streamline efficiency and productivity. Considering these tips when capturing insights from your next meeting will help ensure you’re making effective use of your time while taking detailed meeting notes. For more productivity hacks, don’t forget to check out the Fellow blog!