Jira product discovery: Atlassian’s new tool for product managers

Created byPoint Ateam in 2021, Jira Product Discovery is a new tool (currently in beta) by Atlassian for product managers. It helps you organize, prioritize, and analyze ideas and provides ways to bring them to life.

Product managers and stakeholders can aggregate the idea’s information, context, and value by allowing users to capture insights about their ideas from various sources. Atlassian has also created extensions for daily use apps such as Chrome, Slack, Gmail, and others. So, whenever you want to capture an insight (a thought, guiding principle, or inspiration), you can add that insight directly to an existing idea or even create a new one using the extensions.

There are several new field types available in Jira Product Discovery, enhancing the possibilities of visualization by ordering, filtering, and grouping ideas. It is easy to manage and customize projects with colors and emojis. The customizations and colors help you capture the attention of the stakeholders and encourage them to engage with the tool.

Keep Track of Ideas

Jira Product Discovery works with only one issue type,Idea, which represents ideas for a project, product, team, or organization.

It is essential to mention that ideas,especiallyolder ones, should not be discarded. Some ideas might not fit the company’s existing priorities but might bring great value in the future. So, it is important to keep these ideas and, more importantly, keep them updated.

Capture Ideas and Insights

Teams often have great insights, but they are often spread across multiple tools, making it challenging to put them into action.

You can include insights in ideas, set an impact, and even add a label to organize them. Add insights directly to the idea or use Atlassian’s extensions for third-party tools. Including insights in ideas is as easy as selecting the text. It’s also possible to create new ideas from insights.

Work with Fields

There are several fields available to make ideas more informative. Some you might recognize from Jira software projects, while some are new that let you add weight, color, and emoji values.

Let’s explore new field types available in Jira Product Discovery:

1. Sliders

A new visual interface that lets you measure any value from 0 to 100 with a slider.

2. Custom Formulas

Jira Product Discovery offers three custom formula fields, allowing you to aggregate information from different fields into a new one.

• Roll-up:For Roll-up formula will sum the chosen value on inputs
• Weighted score:For Weighted score formula will distribute in % the weight between selected inputs
• Write your own:Create your expression using the available fields or a new one (multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction)

3. Vote

Vote is a new field in Jira Product Discovery for prioritizing ideas. You need to set the number of votes available for each user. Once a user reaches the vote limit, they will not be able to vote again.

Participants can include a comment for all votes.

For now, the vote field is limited to one round of votes. If you need a new round of voting, you’d need to create a new vote field.

4. Adding Weights to Fields

You can add weights to some of the fields for theSelectandMulti-Selectfields. So, depending on the product manager’s way of prioritizing, some of the options might take extra impact once they are selected.

Organize Views for Your Project

Jira Product Discovery works with three views: list, board, and matrix. Each view can be used for different use cases to visualize and analyze the data.

1. List View

The list view displays ideas in a tabular format, where they can be grouped, filtered, and sorted by any field. A suggestion here is to create different lists for different use-cases and then share them with stakeholders. When using the list view, it is also possible to edit the ideas directly from the list view as well as bulk change them.

2. Board View

Create a kanban-style board where the columns represent values from a field*and other fields are displayed or hidden inside the card (if desired). Additionally, it is possible to add a swimlane with another field. Each swimlane represents a value similar to the columns. Once the ideas move from one column to another or from one swimlane to another, the values change automatically to the value represented by the column or the swimlane.

*you can customize the fields used to create columns, swimlanes, or display data on cards.

3. Matrix View

Matrix view is an X-Axis / Y-Axis graph view, where each axis is represented by a field. The bubbles in the matrix view are the ideas and can be bigger or smaller depending on the size. The bubble’s size is represented by a field and is optional.

Like the board view, it is possible to change the field values by dragging and dropping the bubble, except for dynamic fields.

Connect Ideas to Your Development Task

It is important to capture, organize, and prioritize insights and ideas. However, it’s even more critical to connect ideas to your development tasks and bring them to life.

That’s why Jira Product discovery lets you link ideas to epics, stories, bugs, or tasks from any Jira software project or even create them directly from ideas. Once an idea is connected to a task, you can follow its progress by accessing the idea or by adding theDelivery Progressfield.

Atlassian’s Jira Product Discovery is a great tool for organizing and prioritizing ideas and turning them into actual deliverables. The three different views work effectively, and you can also link development tasks to ideas. The application is still in beta so we can expect some exciting improvements in the upcoming weeks.

As an Atlassian Platinum Enterprise Solution Partner, we solve strategic business problems with Atlassian’s products. Our official partnerships with Atlassian and other leading technology companies like AWS, GitHub, and Ionic, create a unique ecosystem for your success. If you’d like expert advice on setting up your projects in Jira or need any help related to Atlassian tools, talk to Modus.