Your company’s strategy lives in a PowerPoint deck. Your execution lives in Jira. Between the two sits a gap where good plans quietly go to waste, because nobody can see whether the day-to-day work actually adds up to the goals leadership set. Łukasz Romaniuk has spent years building the layer that closes that gap, and he brought it to Work Evolution Summit.
Łukasz is a senior solution engineer at Appfire, and he has co-developed BigPicture since 2019, so he knows the product from the inside. Appfire has sold on the Atlassian Marketplace since 2012 and grown from around 50 people to more than 800 in five years, with a portfolio spanning ITSM, migration, workflow automation, agile work management, and knowledge management. BigPicture sits in that agile work management space, and Łukasz used his session to show what it does and, more importantly, the philosophy behind how it does it.
From Chaos to Transparency
Start with the executive problem Łukasz named. You have plenty of delivery data in Jira, but no reliable way to plan, prioritize, fund, and control work across projects and portfolios. There is no single source of truth pulling those threads together, so decisions get made on insufficient and often incorrect information, and the business feels the consequences.
BigPicture’s answer is to turn Jira from an execution tracker into portfolio-grade decision support. Łukasz drew the line cleanly. Jira is execution, the tasks you deliver. BigPicture is decision making, planning, and control, one model that carries you from strategy to funding to capacity to delivery. It behaves as a long-term project portfolio management layer while staying open to the finance tools you might add later. His sharpest point about why this matters came at the expense of a familiar tool. As Łukasz put it: “PowerPoint is excellent for a presentation, but when it comes to connection of strategy, not really”
Strategy that exists only in slides never touches the work. Big Picture exists to connect the two.
It Bends to You, Not the Other Way Around
This is the idea that set Łukasz’s talk apart from a standard product pitch. BigPicture adds its own layer of hierarchy, which the team calls boxes, that lives alongside your native Jira hierarchy rather than replacing it. That layer aligns with any framework you run. From a single portfolio, you can hang a pure waterfall project built. Next to it you can run a hybrid project split into waterfall and agile stages, and next to that a fully scaled agile setup with release trains, program increments, and iterations.
The reason that flexibility matters is his central promise. BigPicture follows your transformation. If you run waterfall today and start an agile journey in five years, the tool adjusts to you. If you are an agile software house adopting a scaled framework, it adjusts again. It never forces you to change your framework or the way you work in Jira, and it scales with your maturity rather than demanding you match its assumptions. Łukasz put it in the warmest terms of the day.
“BigPicture loves your teams as they are, no judgement.”
That principle showed up in the questions afterward. An attendee explained that her company keeps one development project shared across many customer accounts, and asked whether she could see just her customer’s tickets in a portfolio. His answer was simple. Identify the customer through the Jira custom field you already use, save a JQL query as a filter, and build a BigPicture project from it. The view stays dynamic, so any new work item carrying that field appears automatically. The tool shapes itself around how you already organize your work.
Connecting Money and Capacity to the Work
Two of BigPicture’s enterprise strengths solve problems that usually live in spreadsheets. The first is financial planning. In most organizations, budgets sit in Excel or an ERP, cut off from delivery, with no link between the money planned and the work actually done, no history, and no way to compare scenarios. BigPicture ties portfolio and project budgets directly to the scope, the Jira work items, the program increments, and the timelines. You choose the data source, comparing capex and opex based on a JQL query or existing custom fields, then watch budgets, targets, thresholds, and burn-up over time. It even keeps historical versions of your plans, so you can show exactly how a budget changed and when, which is what auditing and traceability actually require.
The second is resources and capacity. Teams get overloaded without anyone seeing it coming, initiatives get approved with no realistic feasibility check, and resources planned per project collide with decisions made at the portfolio level. BigPicture compares resource demand against availability at whatever level you need, whether that is a person, a team, a skill, a project, a portfolio, or the whole enterprise. It detects conflicts, shows you who is overloaded, and surfaces bottlenecks, which turns a go or no-go call into a decision backed by data rather than optimism.
From Objectives to Priorities Without a Single Script
Łukasz named the OKR module his favorite recent addition, and it addresses a familiar mess. Too many initiatives, unclear priorities, and no objective way to weigh value against risk and capacity. When your structure is built only on work items, nothing connects to your objectives. BigPicture adds a third layer on top. Jira gives you work items, BigPicture gives you framework alignment, and the OKR module gives you a business-achievements hierarchy, so you can see that a specific epic contributes to a specific objective.
Prioritization is where he made a point worth underlining for anyone who has inherited a mess of spreadsheet formulas. BigPicture lets you prioritize OKRs, objectives, tasks, and increments through the interface, at any level, using whatever formula you choose, with no scripting at all. The resulting priority score shows up where each team already looks, in the Gantt chart for waterfall teams and on the board for agile teams. His reasoning was refreshingly grounded.
“I cannot imagine business users scripting anything”
Answering the Questions Leadership Actually Asks
The rest of BigPicture’s value is about turning leadership’s hardest questions into something you can answer on the spot. On risk, you can record an inherent risk, apply a mitigation plan, and compare how much your exposure dropped afterward, rather than leaving risks buried in spreadsheets, tickets, and tribal knowledge. On dependencies, BigPicture tracks them across projects and portfolios and distinguishes strong dependencies, the waterfall kind that always shift a schedule, from soft ones that cross sprints and teams and warn you when a dependency threatens your iteration. Łukasz reached for the obvious example, that you cannot build a roof before the walls.
Then there is the question every executive eventually asks. What if we delay this, or cut that budget, or change the schedule? Answering it the old way takes multiple Excel versions. BigPicture lets you model timelines and resources as scenarios, try different variants of a Gantt schedule side by side, and push nothing to production until the change is approved. And because reporting is where decisions actually get made, the dashboards refresh live, so no executive acts on stale data. At the enterprise level, BigPicture flags derailed projects against on-track ones at a glance, which cuts the noise and lets leaders get insight without digging down to the task level.
Built to Grow With You
Łukasz closed by contrasting BigPicture in 2018, when its onboarding framework was themed around saving a princess and fighting minions, with the 2026 product built for performance, reliability, scalability, and broad framework support. That maturity now includes proactive performance monitoring, where Appfire’s developers watch a cloud instance and fix problems before a customer even raises a ticket. Everything syncs bidirectionally and live with Jira, and teams can edit the same Gantt chart together in real time, which makes fully remote planning workable. Through Big Template and a set of third-party integrations, you can even import existing plans from Excel or Microsoft Project, work breakdown structure and all.
The thread running through the whole session is the one worth keeping. Most tools ask your teams to bend around them, and adoption suffers for it. BigPicture’s bet is the reverse, that software should adjust to how your people already work and simply make their decisions better informed. So look honestly at your own strategy layer. Does it connect to the work your teams do every day, or does it live in a deck that nobody opens once the planning meeting ends?
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About Life in Codes
Life in Codes is on a mission: to support organizations of all kinds to work in a more productive way. That means smart tools, healthy practices, and training the people. As an Atlassian Solutions Partner active in Romania, Estonia, Belgium, UK and the UAE, with our team spread across Europe.
Our client roster includes start-ups, SMEs, large financial institutions like SWIFT, government organizations like the European Commission, and logistics providers such as DHL.Our expertise spans a wide range of solutions, including ITSM, Agile Project Management, Digitalization, Knowledge Management, next-level customer support, DevOps, cloud migration and Rovo AI agents.
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