Case Study: Thrillist achieves scalable cross-team planning and saves 10+ hours/week with Jira Software (Portfolio for Jira)

How Thrillist merged into Group Nine Media and scaled its planning process with Portfolio for Jira

Thrillist—which later merged with NowThis, The Dodo, and Seeker to form Group Nine Media—struggled to align plans and communicate progress across multiple teams. They were tracking work in spreadsheets and running a daily 30-minute meeting with 21 stakeholders, a time-consuming process that didn’t scale as teams reorganized into cross-functional pods.

They implemented Portfolio for Jira (integrated with Jira Software and their version control system), moved to Scrum, and used Portfolio’s dependency, capacity, and schedule reports to maintain a living plan. This replaced the spreadsheet and daily status meeting, saved the organization more than 10 collective hours per week, improved cross-team visibility and forecasting, and made executive reporting and dependency management far more reliable.

Thrillist

Mike Solomon

Director of Program Management