How are we supposed to promote Jira Align without a way to have hands on access?
Asked by Jimi Wikman:

I spend a lot of my time helping organizations work in Jira, much of it is downwards towards the teams, but I get a lot of questions on how to work with Portfolio and program organizations in all kinds of methodologies and processes.

I can get relatively far in the production portfolios using Advanced Roadmaps (even if it is very bare bone on Cloud still), but for the portfolios higher up in the production line and for strategic portfolios that is not enough.

I would like to recommend Jira Align, but without hands-on experience I never recommend anything and for some reason it seems we can not get a trial license for this purpose?

I am a bit curious as to how your business plan look if you do not want experts to recommend your products due to lack of access?

...and no, a demo will not work. We need to be able to dig into Align and test different scenarios to really understand its abilities and limitations before we can recommend it.

So, how do we get our hand of this product, so we can start figuring out what it does and does not do? I am a bit tired of recommending competitors products over align because I have no way to verify its value inside for example a multinational corporation or a mid-sized local company.


Answers:
author: Aiden Marriott
body: Rightly or wrongly, I think the answer is that they are not interested in you recommending it right now. I think Atlassian is focusing on getting the launch right within a small number of places and Atlassian partners.

comments: author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Indeed, it's not being directly sold, you have to engage with the Align team directly

Mostly via a partner though - a handful of my people have done an enablement session with the Align team, so we're allowed to "sell" it, but if people are interested, and come to us, we do some basic assessment and if they are a credible client and Align is a good fit for them, then we then get Atlassian Align people in place to get the process of enabling and selling it going.

By the way - "credible client" in there is not about people being believable. Align demands a lot of business buy in and Atlassian have some rules about not selling Align to people who are not ready for it, or it's not suitable for - a credible client meets the basic criteria, such as a minimum number of developers in the teams, they're well along their transformation to a more scaleed Agile environment, management are fully bought in and so-on.

But, yes, I'd love to have the ability to play with an install to get a feel for it.  

(Well, actually, as I've done the enablement myself, I do - Adaptavist have a demo/play Align install)


author: Aiden Marriott
body: Hi Nic, thanks for providing further info. It is frustrating for smaller partners like ourselves, and it seems counter-intuitive to not want to sell to as many people as possible. However, I can see the logic to it.


author: Mark Cruth
body: Hi [@Jimi Wikman](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1186268) ! If you reach out to Atlassian using the link below (to request more information on Jira Align), we can set you up with a trial instance for you to explore (we call it Launchpad). Launchpad allows you to play around with how Jira Align is configured and the different functionality in the tool, to determine if it would support your needs.

<https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/align#contact>