Discovering Jira Product Discovery!
Jira Produ..wha?
For a long while Product Management ‘folk’ have either patiently wrangled with trying to manage their ideation by hacking together elements of Jira, or by abandoning hope and making use of a dedicated platform like Aha! In their wisdom, the Atlassian gods created Jira Product Discovery (JPD to the officiated) to provide a native experience within Atlassian Cloud (sorry on-premise fans, another one not for you, and another reason to migrate!) that recognises the dedicated features Product Managers, Owners, Designers, and lots of other roles need when managing ideas, concepts, and roadmappy type things.
Doesn’t Jira have roadmaps in it already? I’m sure I remember a timeline thing called something like that…
Both Cloud and on-premise variations of Jira have included functionality various referred to as “Roadmaps” previously… but they arguably weren’t. These have now been retitled to “Timelines” within projects (which provides, and “Plans” (formerly Advanced Roadmaps, formerly Portfolio for Jira) which do what they say on the tin, and provide handy dedicated Gantt-style views to communciate specific dates, dependencies, and similar data in conventional Jira Projects (For those working at scale, Jira Align also offers some specific Roadmapping features we won’t explore here but are worth reviewing).
Ant Murphy and other product gurus have produced lots of great thinking guiding on why Plans and Roadmaps aren’t the same — follow him on Linkedin for all sorts of goodness:
Enough talk! Show me some tools!
Once you’ve enabled JPD on your instance, your first port of call is the new project menu. I struggled to find any difference between the roadmap and discovery templates, so you can basically select either if you’d like to try a curated view with some example data, or a blank project if you’d like a clean sheet. We’ll use the templates for our summary to show the demo data 😉
Clicking through to the template details gives you your first indication that you’re not in K̶a̶n̶s̶a̶s̶ Jira anymore. The template shows you a producty sounding default workflow, and the included issue type is shown as Idea. Ideas (appropriately) are the units of stuff we’ll be working with in JPD — later on we can link these to other issue types held in other Jira projects to show how those ideas (small and big) are being delivered.
All the gear, and lots of ideas
Jumping into our shiny new Product Project (don’t say that too fast) shows you a lovely new view Jira Admins of old could only dream of, though definitely more familiar looking to those who’ve played with the artist-formerly-known-as-Jira Work Management or Team Managed Projects recently. In our template, each of the views is fairly self explanatory:
- All Ideas: Similar to the issues and/or list views in Jira projects, gives you a very customisable list/grid type view. Hitting “Create a view” and “create a new list” on the left hand side enables you to create multiple list views, which can be tailored to the data any specific audience fancies seeing. This is a great asset for giving different stakeholders a tailored view of what they care about most, in a format that works for them, without creating little islands of data.
- Impact vs Effort: is the default example of a Matrix view (again, click “Create a view” to make others. Should you choose to take the redpill, these views enable you to visually organise your Ideas by assigning numeric fields to the X and Y Axis, and a 3rd numeric field to control the size of the blobs representing each idea. Those numeric fields can also be calculated by JPD, which we’ll come to later… comparing how scary something is with the size of the prize for delivering it is a classic usecase here, but essentially it’s up to you. For SAFe fans, it can also support usage of WSJF:
- Product roadmap: this is the default example of a board view in JPD. These operate at once very differently, and similarly to boards in Jira. As with Kanban and Scrum boards in Jira, they exist to easily allow you to organise items using drag and drop columns. Unlike Jira however, the field associated with those columns can be easily configured — in the case of our example it’s using a specific field Roadmap which offers the options Now / Next / Later / Won’t Do, but it could basically be used for anything. Want a way to easily drag and drop Ideas into columns to assign which team they’re for? No problems! As in Ant Murphy’s guidance, using a board view to create a true roadmap view can be a create communication tool
- Product timeline: our last view type example is a timeline. This one does get a little confusing as it duplicates the name of the Gantt-style view in Jira Projects, but it does have a producty-lens on it — the way of organising the Ideas is configurable using all your JPD fields we’ve referenced earlier, and the dates used to display where things sit can pick based on whatever date fields you choose. For communicating a timeline to stakeholders this might mean (for example) that you are showing dates for a specific intent (perhaps to moderate expectations or align dependencies) vs the more work planning oriented view in Jira which is typically seeking 1:1 realism with work schedules at a team level.
Fields everywhere!
Jira’s got fields, and so does JPD! From an admin perspective these are ‘special’ and sit apart from the others in your products, and with that comes some specialness. The first thing you’ll notice is some options like slider and rating that aren’t available in regular Jira:
…the second is heavy encouragement to introduce emojis and formatting when creating your field. This reinforced JPD’s intended purpose: friendly and approachable communication
Below the standard fields sit Dynamic ones. Starting with the simplest: Votes is for… giving people the ability to vote for ideas in your JPD project. Custom formula gets more complex (and powerful), enabling you to roll up, weight, or write custom calculations to bring together data from other numeric (including rated) fields in you project — as with our example of Impact vs Effort earlier.
Automation for Jira fans will again be well served and recognise the syntax:
Finding Insight(s)
The best product teams know the value of backing up their ideas with data — and JPD builds this in via the handy Insights tab attached to each Idea.
Insights are a native way to capture evidence and references for each Idea — and JPD offers a variety of handy ways to make this easy including a Chrome plugin, integrations with messaging apps, and more. There’s a full guide in this handy article:
Ready for delivery? It’s just a click away!
Wow it feels like we’ve done a lot already… but all we’ve got until now is ideas! It’s time to make them real by linking your work to delivery tickets in Jira-land. In all the views where you expand a ticket, or in the Idea itself under the delivery tab, you’ll notice the ability to create a new issue in any project (of any type — Epic, Task,Story, you name it) or to link to an existing issue.
For Automation for Jira fans it’s also possible to trigger this step — for example creating new delivery Epics for any Idea that makes it past a “Concept Approved” or similar status in JPD.
Ok you’ve sold me — how much is it?
Like with much of Atlassian’s cloud suite, JPD starts at ‘free’ for up to three ‘creators’ who actively create and manage things — see the online pricing pay for scales and tiers beyond this. Similarly to the concept of “Agents” vs “Users” in JSM, all tiers of JPD allows an unlimited ‘contributors’ for free to allow stakeholders and similar people to collaborate on product features (doubtless a popular ask when gathering inputs and opinions on roadmaps!).
Can I try it then?
Of course — https://www.atlassian.com/try
