For People Element, the decision to change development providers came with an unexpected consequence: their entire development history was about to be left behind.
Every Jira ticket, spanning years of work, lived inside an instance owned by their previous provider. Issues, comments, custom fields, descriptions, and formatting weren’t just data points; they were the living record of how the product had been built and evolved. And once the provider transition started, People Element had only a narrow window to move everything into a brand-new Jira environment.
“There was a moment where we realized just how short the timeline was,” Julia, Product Manager at People Element, recalls. “And at that point, we knew this wasn’t going to be simple.”
When “export” isn’t really an option
The initial research phase made one thing clear very quickly: the standard Jira export options weren’t going to work.
“All we really found was that you could export your Jira issues,” Julia explains. “But then you lose everything. The history, the comments, the formatting, and that just wasn’t the right option for us.”
The alternative was third-party migration tools. But many of them felt more like bulk imports than true migrations.
“Some of the tools we looked at felt almost like doing an Excel import,” she says. “That didn’t give us a lot of confidence.”
What People Element needed wasn’t just a way to move tickets. They needed a way to preserve continuity, to make sure that when a ticket appeared in the new Jira instance, it still felt like the same ticket.
Choosing a migration that didn’t feel like a gamble
When People Element found Getint, the difference was immediately noticeable.
“It just seemed more user-friendly,” Julia says. “There was a lot of documentation, and the responses were quick. That made a huge difference when you’re already stressed about a migration.”
The goal was clear from the start: every ticket needed to arrive in the new Jira instance looking and behaving exactly as it did before.
“What was most important to us was maintaining the integrity of the tickets,” she explains. “The custom fields, the history, the comments, the descriptions - including all the formatting. We needed them to transfer over and look the same as they did before.”
Learning Jira from the inside out
While the migration itself was Jira-to-Jira, the real complexity lay elsewhere.
Because People Element was setting up a brand-new Jira instance, everything on the destination side had to be configured from scratch. For Julia, who wasn’t the admin of the original instance, this revealed just how deep Jira configuration can go.
“There’s just so much more to Jira than meets the eye,” she admits. “Project levels, fields, configurations - it was definitely a learning curve.”
At one point, understanding how Jira’s APIs worked became a turning point.
“I hadn’t worked with APIs much before,” Julia says. “Once you explained that we were essentially leveraging the create API, it started to make more sense. I realized I just needed to have everything set up exactly the way I wanted it to land in the new instance.”
That clarity turned confusion into momentum.
A migration across holidays, time zones, and real life
The timing didn’t make things easier.
The migration took place around the holidays, with People Element in the US and Getint operating several hours ahead. Still, support didn’t stop when the calendar got inconvenient.
Despite the time difference, help was consistently available, and when it wasn’t live, the documentation filled the gap.
“Even when it was your nighttime, the knowledge base, the walkthroughs, and the YouTube videos were incredibly helpful,” she says. “I never felt stuck without an option.”
Watching everything fall into place
After test runs and careful preparation, the migration finally ran.
And then came the moment that mattered most.
“It was really cool to see the system work,” Julia says. “You could actually watch the tickets come over. When I opened them, they looked just like they did in the previous instance.”
That visual confirmation - the familiarity of tickets appearing unchanged - was the reassurance People Element needed.
“It was rewarding to keep all the integrity in place,” she adds. “That’s something you really can’t do with basic exports.”
The result: continuity instead of disruption
In the end, People Element completed a complex Jira-to-Jira migration under intense time pressure, without sacrificing history or structure.
“You guys helped us do this so quickly in such a rushed period of time,” Julia says. “And that made a huge difference for us.”
What could have been a disruptive break instead became a controlled transition - one where the past remained intact, and the team could move forward without losing context.
“Migrations are stressful by nature,” Julia reflects. “But seeing everything land exactly where it should, without losing anything - that made it feel like we did it the right way.”
