📣 A (giant) update for hierarchies, issue types, opportunity/solution trees

[vincentsynan]

@Tanguy Crusson this looks like it will become very useful! At the Economist, we are using JPD extensively in our Product Development and Delivery process. The two products have become interchangeable in fact.
Please consider us for the Lighthouse experiment; we have a ready to go Use Case!

[Antoni Abella Vendrell]

@Tanguy Crusson , I love the feature and also how you presented it. This feature seems to be still in developement based you the public roadmap. As a fellow PM, I was wondering how did you manage to do the demo before the feature has been fully developed? Do you guys first build a happy path in a dev/staging environment that you can do demos on?  

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Antoni Abella Vendrell we use feature branches in Bitbucket and feature flags to test the features as they get built and roll them out progressively to customers. It's amazing tooling that helps us so much. More details here:  https://www.loom.com/share/8885a550e64f4d9aa18c997e3e1858b7?sid=635215b0-5da3-4f90-9491-e1cb40ceaf8c

[damian_rochman]

This looks great and definitely handles one of the main things that were missing in JPD! Great job @Tanguy Crusson and team! Can't wait to start using this!

[Alex Gardner]

Looks great would like to be a lighthouse customer!!

[James Conway]

@Tanguy Crusson this is really disappointing news. Jira 3.0 introduced sub-tasks in 2005, epics were introduced later - i can't see when exactly, but at least 15-20 years ago. So for the vast majority of your user base, issue hierarchy in Jira is basic functionality. 

My team already have created a process and issue types in Jira Software for Product Gaps, and these can be up and downgraded from massive initiatives to epics, and stories and tasks within that.

I struggle to see how I can justify getting premium licenses for our PM team for basic functionality, then the additional comment type fields (essentially what insights are) and custom fields that JPD standard introduces.  

I don't imagine my comment will change the direction of the JPD roadmap, but at least this news has made it clearer how we'll develop our product stack through 2025.

You or your team can reach out to me on Linkedin if you wish to discuss further

[Tanguy Crusson]

Hi @James Conway , we don't generally comment on pricing & packaging decisions (there's a lot that goes into those...) but I wouldn't compare this feature with sub-tasks and epics.

In fact we're trying to stay well clear of that (work breakdown) as this is a job that the rest of Jira focuses on. If I were to compare it to other Jira features that would be the custom work hierarchy that Jira Plans provide in Jira Cloud Premium. It's a different approach to the same problem area, and focusing on product conversations (for which 1 directional work breakdown hierarchies aren't particularly useful).

[Yiling Baldez]

Our team has been needing this feature! We can't wait to use it and would love to be a lighthouse customer.

[erik.honn]

Very neat solutions, this solves a lot if problems we are currently looking for organising large workflows in my org! I love how the focus for JPD is to provide a baseline feature and then let you set up your workflow using views, rather than forcing one fixed workflow on everyone.

If additional users are needed for testing this in the future we would be very interested.

[Simon Lafortune]

Our team also really need this feature! But I don't see why it would be behind the premium feature to be honest. This is a pretty critical feature for JPD. Please consider it.

[Antoni Abella Vendrell]

Any updates, I cannot wait to use it! :) 

Right now I'm using a property to describe the idea type (e.g., large/small Eng effort, competitor, problem, etc.). I'm wondering if there will be support to migrate.

[Arnau Biosca]

Hello @Tanguy Crusson An elegant solution for managing hierarchies without actually building them, thus avoiding their side-effects, congratulations! I have one question, could you explain what will be the behaviour for field referencing between connected issues, and if possible, until how many levels/connections will references work? Currently this can only be achieved through Insights > Idea connection, and the Insight needs to be a link to a Jira ticket (not JPD). I wonder if this change will allow this feature to be more native.

Use Case: Imagine I want to score (to prioritise) Feature Ideas (Issue Type = Feature Idea) connected to different User Needs (Issue Type = User Need), having each User Need a field called "My_User_Need_Score", which is a calculated field based on some inputs on other fields from this Issue. Will I be able to create a "Connected_Needs_Score" field on the Feature Idea level that uses (rolls up, averages...) the "My_User_Need_Score" from their connected User Needs. If yes, could I then calculate this "My_Need_Score" based on the connected "Companies" issue type, each one having an "ARR" field used on the "My_Need_Score" formula?    

[Matt Richards]

@Tanguy Crusson - We are in the process of centralizing our varied workflows into Atlass, Compass, Jira, JPD and Confluence. If you are accepting early adopters, I'd love to take part as this will fundamentally change the way in which we approach the use of JPD in this ecosystem (especially if in that last visualization you are bubbling hierarchies up to Atlas Goals. I've been using Jira and other Atlassian tools for over 20 years and would love to contribute my thoughts. 

[gianmarco.spiga]

Echoing the previous comments: JPD Premium seems ideally suited for larger orgs (or orgs of orgs) who need higher lever planning, and we are thoroughly looking forward to it.

However, idea hierarchies and issue types are tablestakes for anyone. The workaround Tanguy offered in a different video is ok for a very small subset of cases, but results in a proliferation of views and some awkward mental gymnastics, which is what we are trying to avoid. 

[David Nadri]

@Tanguy Crusson 

1. In the JPD Roadmap, when and how do Launched ideas in the Impact stage get removed from the Launched column? When someone moves ideas from Impact to 'Done' or some other stage, the view is configured to filter them out?
2. This roadmap view is similar to the Now/Next/Later concept, however it shows 'Launched' ideas which are helpful, but where are the 'Later' ideas that are after 'Up Next'?
3. The handbook mentions ideas are classified as Boulders, Rocks, or Pebbles. Which ideas does the JPD Roadmap show? Seems like mostly Rocks, no Pebbles. Also, besides Bugs, does every delivery ticket have a corresponding JPD idea? Or, does the JPD team ever create stories in Jira without it going through JPD first?
4. Any thoughts on my last comment on this article?

[Tanguy Crusson]

Hi everyone, thanks a lot for the feedback so far. Apologies for the lack of updates since this post, we've been heads down building this feature. We're super close to being able to share with the rest of Atlassian for dogfooding, and the first 10 customers. If you haven't heard back from us yet, it means you're not part of this first group - we'll get back in touch when we move from 10 to 100 customers (you can read more about our product process in this section of the discovery handbook)

On other questions/comments:

• I understand it will be disappointing news for a few of you but for now we are not looking at adding this feature in the standard plan. It's currently intertwined with our solution to help product leaders manage product bets at different levels of elevation which is the promise we're making in the Premium plan, so we want to make sure we deliver on that story. We might change this in the future and package things differently, but for now this feature is only going to be available in Premium. 
• @Arnau Biosca: great question - that's come up a lot in our discussions with customers so far. For now, v1 is not going to offer the ability to roll things up yet, but it's something we do plan to look into. As a workaround it should be possible to do this with Automation rules.  
• @David Nadri we manage a separate JPD project for the public roadmap. Nothing is automated, it's all manually curated (it's by choice - this view gets a lot of traffic we want to make sure it tells the right story). We only share a subset of what we look at, to give customers visibility into where the product is going. We use Now/Next/Later internally (and other roadmap formats), but for the public roadmap it felt more useful to reflect our level of commitment like that. 

[David Nadri]

@Tanguy Crusson thx. To clarify, for your internal Now/Next/Later roadmap, does EVERY single feature AND improvements (e.g. 'pebbles' that end up being one-off user stories -- like change the color of a button, instead of epics) have an Idea in JPD?

OR, do you ever go straight to creating a user story for that tiny pebble change? Because I feel that there could be dozens and dozens of these and they could clutter the internal roadmap...

[Tanguy Crusson]

@David Nadri definitely not. we have a ton more work items in Jira than ideas in JPD. 

Our pebbles view today is for things that we can address in a sprint or two:

[David Nadri]

@Tanguy Crusson - so then how do you get a complete view of every feature and improvement on your roadmap—if some are in JPD and some are only in Jira? Do you consolidate everything in Jira using release versions or a similar approach? For example, if 10 ideas are in JPD and 5 pebbles skip JPD but are part of the same release, is there a way to see a bird’s-eye view of all features in that release to help with communication?

[Tanguy Crusson]

We don't really need to see everything that everyone is working on at that level... What would be the point? We focus conversations on the big ticket items. Engineers can pick things they want to improve on their own, create a ticket and ship it, etc. We have a weekly demo with the whole team, and we often get nice surprises. We didn't build JPD to micro-manage everyone!

[Stewart Hemingway]

Definitely keen for this! Love to see the new features coming regularly. Any chance to be part of the early adopters group?

[brent.johnson]

I just stumbled across this while we were thinking about this challenge. Happy to help test @Tanguy Crusson 

[Youri REGNAUD]

Is these new feature can enable to create insights/feedbacks from customers users and after link/transform these feedbacks in insights like to ideas/opportunity/…? One of the big issue of JPD is to start from Ideas and not from users feedbacks. Thanks

[acorvino]

@Tanguy Crusson - this is exactly what we need!  Your approach is making me think of many additional ways we could leverage this functionality to help our team.  I'd love to be considered for your lighthouse group, if it is still open.

[Matt Richards]

The #1 feature request we get for JPD is, consistently and since the early days of this app, for it to support hierarchies.

JPD is fantastic, but to have learned that this need is fundamental and to then take the solution and gate it behind your highest tier is outrageous.