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

[Stefan Pidzamecky]

@Tanguy Crusson Would love access to issue hierarchies in JPD! We have a big need for this to enable better story-telling with our roadmap views!

[Cory Muir]

@Tanguy Crusson Would also be interested in trying this new Premium feature ASAP....

[Christian]

We are also interested. Please activate us, as this is an absolute must for us. Otherwise, we would have to switch to another solution, which I would like to avoid.

[BLNSS]

We would really like access to premium as well!  Add us to the list, @Tanguy Crusson ; we are loving the standard version and looking forward to more features!

[Tanguy Crusson]

Hi everyone, quick update: we've been testing this feature with lighthouse customers and it's gone really well so far: all except one managed to do what they set out to accomplish with it, and in some cases a lot more.

You'll soon be able to try it as well. 

On that note: slight change of plan: we looked for a way to make it easy for people to try it without overwhelming the team (the demand has been really strong! This took us a bit by surprise. To be honest I receive emails, messages on LinkedIn, etc. on a daily basis).

We think we found one:

We are currently planning to launch the JPD Premium plan in the next couple of months. In fact, and I can't believe I'm about to say this, but to be 100% transparent our current goal is 30 April. HOWEVER this comes with all the usual disclaimers: we're still hitting road blocks on a weekly basis (so far we've managed to wiggle our way around those though!), murphy's law is a thing, the best way to make the gods laugh is to tell them about your plans, etc. Anyway, you get the picture: if I were you I'd take that date with a pinch of salt. 

Premium has a bunch of features, described here. This one will be part of it and marked as "Coming soon": but we'll make it so you're able to turn it on to use it.

Here's what you'll be able to do as soon as the Premium Plan launches: 

• Upgrade to a trial of the Premium plan
• Turn on this feature in the Jira admin settings for the site
• Use the feature and decide if it's right for you
• If it's right for you you can stay on the Premium plan post trial
• If not and you don't see value out of the other features, then you can simply downgrade back to the Standard plan, no harm done. 

We'll let you know as soon as you can do so. 

[damian_rochman]

Thank you for the update @Tanguy Crusson ! Can't wait to try this out!

[Tanguy Crusson]

Here's where we got to (current state of the feature):

• How to use this feature and set it up: https://www.loom.com/share/7ff758ec115b410589691adccc537c9b
• How to configure it to connect ideas in different JPD projects (e.g. company initiatives in one JPD project, and contributions from different teams working in different JPD projects: https://www.loom.com/share/3310aee20261484fa6b63e5ff6abc292

[Simon Lafortune]

@Tanguy Crusson Great update thank you! We are all product leaders in this thread, and we all want to build features to increase revenue .But I have to agree with the others comments on this post that having this feature behind the Premium plan don't make sense at all. I am really not understanding you're strategy here. This is a core feature of JPD as of today and the reason you receive so much messages is people will leave JPD without it.

Looking at your Premium, It will be very hard to make budget and pass to a Premium plan for such core feature that competitors offer right in their normal plan. All other offerings in Premium are not suited and needed at all for us. No way in hell my CFO would allow this upgrade. The Premium plan offerings looks more like an Enterprise plan and does not suite our 5 users & single project need.

Please take our feedback and rethink your current feature offering. Maybe increase standard plan pricing but include this one in the standard or add this one as an Addons not per users.
Thanks for the consideration.

[Matt Richards]

@Tanguy Crusson From a product perspective can you explain the rationale behind gating your "most popular request" (your description) behind your most expensive plan?

[Steve.Winton]

Is premium based on an extra fee for the Creator license users only i.e. incremental cost to use, or has to be calculated for all Creators and Contributors, or (worse) all Atlassian users for the org regardless whether they use JPD?

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Simon Lafortune @Matt Richards we understand it's not a popular decision with everyone, pricing & packaging decisions rarely are. I'm not sure that the argument "people want this so you have to include it in the standard plan" holds though - I'm pretty sure that, if asked, everyone would prefer if everything was free 🙂 Once the launch of the premium plan has settled I'd love to find time to write a post that explains how we look at pricing and packaging - it's part art, part science and there are quite a few (and sometimes competing) aspects we're trying to balance. We're also going to measure the success of this and adapt based on learnings - like any other product decision. 

@Steve.Winton that is correct: it's a higher price per creator - we're not changing anything on the creator/contributor/stakeholder model.

[Michael Evangelista]

@Tanguy Crusson I don't expect to sway the already cemented decision but wanted to weigh in on how this is landing with your community.

If it had been rolled out as a premium feature all along, I think the response you are getting here would be different. However this was hyped up as something that is coming soon and so exciting for all of us, then at the last minute what feels like a rug pull: "actually folks, it is only for the premium tier, which we are creating specifically to bill you for it". 

There's not much chance my company will justify the extra cost for hundreds of users to have this one feature, and there's likely nothing else in what will soon be JPD premium that tips that scale. I'm sure the same is true for many others who participated in this thread. We're fine with the existence of premium features, but not so much the lack of transparency. Thanks for taking the time to read this reply.

[Tanguy Crusson]

Hi @Michael Evangelista where did you read that this would be part of the free or standard plans?

[Keith McGee]

@Tanguy Crusson

I'm relatively new to JPD, having started using it in December. One of the first things I noticed—and was disappointed by—was the lack of a hierarchy structure. Coming from Jira Software, where we relied on hierarchy to track our backlog items, this felt like a significant design flaw. In fact, my search for a way to manage this issue is what led me to this post.

When I saw that hierarchy was on the roadmap, I was excited because this limitation has caused considerable challenges for both me and my team. I also noticed that it's a highly requested feature, as reflected in your comment, "The demand has been really strong." However, like others have mentioned, I can't justify upgrading to the premium plan just for this one essential feature—something that really should be a core part of the system.

[Michael Evangelista]

@Tanguy Crusson Fair question. Honest answer, I didn't. In fact you called this out in the initial post, though I realize now I may not have scrolled beyond the videos:

>> It's still early stage: we're going to use it ourselves for a while, then open up access to 10 early (lighthouse) customers before general availability. This feature will be part of the upcoming premium plan for JPD.

What I did see was a solution to the thing that my Jira users have been wanting ever since I led them down the JPD path. Discovery has been exceptionally useful for us, minus this one seemingly simple and obvious inclusion. 

Color me corrected, all good, but also still quite frustrated at the decision. I get the business model, the need to upcharge premium features, and we pay for a decent allotment of monthly Jira Premium seats. This feature just doesn't seem "premium", but core functionality. And without more incentive, I won't get to use it due to cost restrictions. 

Thanks 

[Dirk Lachowski]

Can we maybe get back to this post's original idea of talking about hierarchies in JPD and not about how pricing should be (more on that later)?

@Tanguy Crusson What I'm really interested in: What's the vision for JPD, now that hierarchies are there? Hopefully it won't stop here - and I'm especially interested in how JPD fits into strategic planning. In one of your videos it's already visible that ideas will be rolling up into Atlas goals and that we'll have opportunity trees in that mix - great. What's next? What's the vision for JDP, Atlas and Focus combined? Because discovery isn't really a thing without strategy and with strategy in JPD, we could remove some hierarchy levels from Jira. I understand that there's some internal friction because JPD could cannibalize Align, but then, there's maybe a market for a planning tool for not that huge companies?

For the pricing discussion: I really don't get it. JPD is a tool for PMs and leadership, adding 20 bucks to their costs shouldn't real make a difference. Everybody else can still be a contributor, access views, create ideas and comment on them - for free. And come on guys, you do not want someone from sales to create ideas hierarchies. You want their insights and that's it.

[Tanguy Crusson]

All good, thanks for clarifying @Michael Evangelista !

@Dirk Lachowski there will be another post with that (most likely after Premium launch) - how Focus + JPD + Jira work together and where Goals/Projects fit in there - and where JPD's going next 👍 This topic is where a lot of where the JPD PM team's time goes today.

[Jakub Puchalski]

It looks great and is a very needed feature. Unfortunately, I'm a bit disappointed that it will only be available in the Premium plan. Opportunity Solution Tree is a fundamental tool for PMs and product teams, so why restrict it to only the organizations with the largest adoption of JPD?

[Andrei Masca]

Brilliant demo, thank you for sharing the news.

I tried to see if there are any potential release dates for the feature but I couldn't detect anything on the page here. 

Any sneak peek as to when we might be able to start playing with the feature ?

Many thanks

[Shelly Kitchen]

@Dirk Lachowski - I agree with your point about the distinction between CREATORS and CONTRIBUTORS. However, we're finding that we need to license more users as CREATORS just so they can edit their own ideas.  If someone submits an idea with not much detail, we’d rather send it back to them to fill in more info—without making them leave comments and then wait for someone with a CREATOR license to copy it over to the description.  If people could just update their own ideas, we wouldn’t need as many CREATOR licenses, and the extra cost for the hierarchy wouldn’t feel like such a big deal.

[Dirk Lachowski]

@Shelly Kitchen In my experience, you usually do not want non PM staff to work on descriptions. In my understanding, the description should show the current state of knowledge while comments show how we got there. I've unfortunately seen many examples in our own instance where the description contained sort of discussions where people started to mention someone in the description - something that should clearly live in comments.

Have people comment on ideas, then have a PM flesh out the ideas' state from that comments.

[Tanguy Crusson]

Hi everyone, you'll (very) soon be able to try this feature. 

Catalin (head of design for JPD), Kostia (engineering lead for this feature) and myself are going to do a webinar to explain how we took this feature from inception to delivery. You can sign-up here.

We get a lot of questions about how we work as a team, so if you're curious that's an opportunity to look behind the curtains. We'll share our screen and have super open/honest conversations about how it all went, and you'll get to see how messy it can get when we're right in the middle of big changes like this. We're definitely not the poster child of predictability, on the contrary we've embraced the chaos and learnt to trust the outcome. It's not for everyone but it might give you an idea or two to play with in your own product processes. 

We hope to see you there!

[Antoni Abella Vendrell]

I see that I can create custom types, but I don't see a how to add connection fields, nor how to enable connections in settings. I'm a JPD admin, but not a Jira admin. I thought that idea types and connection fields were both part of the same hierarchies feature, is that not the case? 

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Antoni Abella Vendrell since it's a beta feature you'll need a Jira admin to turn it on first. You can try this in a new site if you like though, it's free, before you ask them, to see if it fits your needs. 

https://www.atlassian.com/try/cloud/signup?bundle=jira-product-discovery&edition=premium

Click on "start a new site". That way you'll be a site admin. Don't put your credit card number and the site will be retired automatically some time after the end of trial. 

[Tanguy Crusson]

Hi everyone: you can now try this feature as part of the JPD Premium plan, which launched (silently 🤫) last week.

• JPD Premium landing page (to sign-up)
• JPD Premium FAQ
• JPD Premium implementation guide

---

Silent launch? 

We do silent launches like this to make sure everything is fine before doing a big marketing push - it gives us the space to validate and iterate before doing announcements. I'd recommend this approach any day: always decouple product and marketing launches!

Context: on November 4th 2015 we announced Hipchat Connect, something we’d been working on for months and announced at Atlassian Summit (our yearly customer conference) and arranged a lot of press coverage for, e.g. TechCrunch. Everything was live the day before the conference. While our CEO was on stage announcing it, Hipchat started to have the biggest outage in its history, and users were unable to use the product for 3 days straight. This incident was pretty horrible to manage.

Since then I promised myself: never again! Launches are now as boring as it gets: we make it live, we don't tell anyone. And later, after we've dotted the i's and crossed the t's, we do the marketing push. If the product's not ready we still announce it, but we redirect users to a waitlist.