Huuuge Games: Unifying product planning in Jira Cloud

What happened and why it matters

Huuuge Games wanted to optimize how product teams worked as the organization grew. Product leaders managed their own priorities, while teams tracked around 30 projects in separate spreadsheets. Stakeholder requests often arrived outside the regular planning process. A lean IT team kept Jira Data Center and custom scripts running reliably, but it required significant effort. To simplify operations and create a unified approach, the company chose to migrate to Atlassian Cloud and standardize planning and delivery in one shared model.

• Two production phases: first 140 people in the core product group, then approximately 160 people across the remaining teams.
• Consolidation of over 30 product projects into one shared Cloud project for the core product team, giving leaders and teams a common view.
• Jira Cloud didn’t simply absorb over 120 legacy scripts; instead, the migration allowed the team to work differently, making many of them unnecessary. By intentionally leaving most scripts behind to simplify operations, including dropping financial processes entirely. They successfully avoided an estimated 140 man-days of custom development.
• Planning and decisions now happen in Jira Plans and Jira Product Discovery, not in spreadsheets and ad hoc decks.
• Data Center is left in read-only mode for reference while the entire company works in Cloud.

Huuuge Games: the team behind the move

Huuuge Games is a global mobile games developer. Teams span product, design, art, engineering, QA, and operations. They collaborate on a live service model where fast iteration and cross-team coordination directly impact revenue.

Many projects in Jira DC, limited shared context

As Huuuge grew, each product team created its own Jira project on a Jira Data Center instance. Local autonomy enabled quick changes, but it limited portfolio-level visibility and added overhead to planning, reporting, and upgrades.

Leadership requested a single view of priorities and progress across product teams, while administrators faced the challenge of managing numerous projects alongside custom solutions. The existing setup could not provide that without extra spreadsheets, meetings, and bespoke scripts.

The specific challenges and their business impact:

• With multiple separate projects per product team, there was no single source of truth for capacity, dependencies, and status across the portfolio. Reviews required manual agreement and exports that aged quickly.
• Roadmaps were often maintained in spreadsheets, which created duplicate work and delayed decisions when numbers changed mid-cycle.
• Hundreds of custom automations and scripts accumulated over time, raising the cost and risk of upgrades and slowing down change.
• A leaner IT team had to spend attention on server maintenance, app upkeep, and exception handling instead of enablement.
• Leaders needed faster, more precise answers on what should start next and what could wait, especially across product teams.

Previous adjustments, such as adding another project or script, solved local issues but made cross-team planning and maintenance more challenging. The company needed a structural change in how work is organized and viewed, not only a change in where Jira runs.

Cloud first, consolidation by design. Huuuge Games’ path to Jira Cloud

Huuuge decided to migrate from Jira Data Center to Atlassian Cloud, using the move to standardize how product teams work. The guiding idea was simple: a shared model for planning and delivery, fewer custom parts, and a single point of decision-making.

Step-by-step implementation:

• Discovery and assessment
  • Full inventory of projects, workflows, custom fields, apps, and scripts.
  • Decision tree per project: merge, migrate 1:1, create smaller new configurations, or design entirely new projects.
  • Broad communication with every team: not only product, but also marketing, legal, and others.
  • Joint analysis with stakeholders to decide the right migration path for each case.
  • Users explored Jira Cloud early on through a dedicated test instance (Atlassian One) with sample data, which helped build confidence and enabled extensive testing and experimentation.
  • The main product team was selected as the first production wave to validate the operating model in a single shared project.
• Pilot and configuration
  • Cloud sandbox to trial consolidation and permissions.
  • Productized workflows and issue types for the product team, plus standard boards and fields.
  • No ScriptRunner in Cloud by design. One needed behavior recreated with native Jira automation.
  • Projects were migrated first to the sandbox and adjusted before production rollout.
  • Errors and issues were resolved in advance to ensure safe production migration.
• Phase 1 cutover - product team (140 people)
  • Merged 18 product team projects into one Cloud project.
  • HyperCare to address configuration questions and adjust dashboards, boards, and filters.
• Phase 2 cutover - remaining teams ( 160 people)
  • Archived or set most legacy projects to read-only in Cloud for reference.
  • Data Center left in read-only mode for a limited time for safe lookup.
  • Double-check with owners to confirm what stays active.
• Plan and decide in one place
  • Jira Plans are used for portfolio schedules and capacity scenarios.
  • Jira Product Discovery is used to validate initiatives, provide executives with context, and capture stakeholder requests for product teams.

Lower spend, faster decisions, simpler stack

The first weeks in Cloud brought visible UX gains and fewer moving parts to maintain. More importantly, product leaders and teams now work from the same project, the same boards, and the exact roadmap, which shortens status meetings and reduces back-and-forth communication.

Financial and time savings, directional view:

Cloud migration summary and future plans

The change that matters most is shared context. With one project model in Cloud, teams and leaders look at the same view, make decisions faster, and spend less time reconciling multiple project structures. The stack is simpler, so upgrades and adjustments do not compete with product work.

Looking forward, the company plans to:

• Use Jira Product Discovery as the standard intake for stakeholder requests across more teams, with an expected 30 percent shorter leadership review cycle within 6 months.
• Grow Jira Service Management and Assets into the system of record for hardware and software, including license tracking, which should reduce audit prep from about 3 days to about 1 day per audit window.
• Continue the meeting-light culture by utilizing dashboards and asynchronous updates, aiming for a 50 percent reduction in recurring status time for product leads within 3 months.
• Maintain a lightweight governance rubric for fields, workflows, and schemes to ensure the one project model remains fast as teams evolve.