AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Jira Product Discovery team

[#1]

Hi team!

As part of Jira Product Discovery June, we want to give you a chance to connect with our team with our Ask Me Anything (AMA). Ask us any burning questions you have across a number of topics, from Premium and product management practices, to how our team tackles certain use cases.

The hosts of this AMA will include members from across our Product and Marketing team.

• Tanguy Crusson
• Hermance NDounga
• Jet Volkering
• Axel Sooriah
• Kesha Thill
• Chris Hall
• Julie Suaro
  
  

Here's how it works:

• Add your questions to this discussion between June 18th - June 30th
• We'll respond to all questions that come through, as they get posted, until June 30th
• Watch the page and add follow-up questions or discuss further with other Community members. We'll wrap up the AMA on June 30th at 5 p.m. PST but we will be sure to follow up with answers to any questions we didn't get to.
  
  

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✨ As part of Jira Product Discovery June, participants in our AMA will also earn the AMA ACE Badge! ✨

Don't forget, commenting on three or more Jira Product Discovery June challenges will earn you the mega badge! 

[__ Jimi Wikman]

While I understand the decision to use a flexible template when starting out with R&D/Discovery for a new product, are you pivoting towards a more standardised solution now so we will see a transition from the Team Managed platform to the Company Managed platform?

Or are you building more control and global settings into the team managed platform instead?

[__ Jimi Wikman]

Today there are connections with Goals, but not with projects. There are also no connections besides goals to the Strategy collection.

What are the plans there, and is there hope that we might see Ideas being brought into a portfolio tool for funding and staffing as part of the JPD workflow?

[__ Jimi Wikman]

Are there any plans to add closer connections with Confluence so we can add more documentation and details? Perhaps the ability to add it to Insights and/or overview instead of adding it as a link or pasting a smart link?

I would love to have it like we have in Jira, where you can open the Confluence document side by side with the work item. That would allow me to work with more information or link to more details.

It would also be great if we could add a ROI section as well as a way to attach findings if we do experiments so you get the full flow from inception of an idea to execution and follow up.

[Katrin Erhardt]

Hello JPD team, thank you very much for the great Q&A offer here! I've already expressed my uncertainties and what I need help with elsewhere, but perhaps other users will be interested and you can provide a few more insights: We want to use JPD as a tool for our IT portfolio planning. It's great for entering and evaluating project ideas and it's very easy for everyone to use and understand. However, we are still struggling with high-level capaity planning in JPD. The video here shows a variant that I like - but due to the fact that our teams are very different in size and the capacities are different per team and per quarter, it is a bit too simple.
Are there any other use cases here? Or can you elaborate on the use case from this blog post (view #2) or describe how you work with it? Thanks in advance!

[Leslie Barrett]

I know that you can use global fields in JPD projects. What I am not sure of is whether that also includes using custom field contexts. Thanks in advance!

[Kesha Thill]

hey @__ Jimi Wikman ! Going to try and answer all 3 of your questions here:

1. We still believe in JPD being flexible as different teams approach intake, prioritization, and roadmapping differently. Some do agile, some do waterfall, some have PgMs running the show and some have PMs driving, so it needs to be able to adapt to your unique ways of working. That being said, we have introduced ways to add more standardization and control, specifically with features like

• global fields to help standardize fields/inputs/terminology across projects
• copy project to help copy existing configurations into a new project
• view restrictions to lock down permissions for individual views

We're also working on more template capabilities to help with standardization. If you take a look at our public roadmap here, you'll also see an idea for "advanced project governance controls" - we exploring more features to help with governance so if you have specifics on what you'd like to see, please do share it with us! Noting that right now, we don't have plans to shift to company managed projects.

2. We do have integrations with Projects and Goals (more info here) but we are continuing to iterate on this integration so you can better visualize a 2-way relationship.

Re. bringing ideas into a portfolio tool to bring funding/staffing into the workflow, with the launch of our Focus app, we are currently exploring how Focus and JPD integrate into a seamless workflow so stay tuned!

3. Yes! Also on our public roadmap (idea here)! We are focused on bringing JPD closer to Confluence, Jira, and JSM. Thank you for sharing your feedback and what you'd like to see! Will add as an insight for our team! 

[Hermance NDounga]

@Leslie Barrett Custom fields contexts aren't supported in team-managed projects, hence aren't supported in Jira Product Discovery as all our projects are team-managed. You can learn more about global fields and context here

Cheers, 
Hermance
Sr. Product Manager @ Jira Product Discovery

[Axel Sooriah]

Hi @Katrin Erhardt 
Thanks for sharing your question.

As you can see we don't yet have a perfect solution for capacity planning and for lightweight capacity planning we need to build in a assumptions so we can at estimate the work teams are planning.

That said, here are a couple of examples of how other customers are doing capacity planning in JPD. 

#1 Getting an idea of which teams are oversubscribed in terms of work planned
In the same vein as what Tanguy shared in the Loom, you could do something like this (see below).

The challenge here is that we are assuming that a team only works on one idea at a time (which is rarely true in reality). 
However we have customers who have told is this is already helpful for their capacity estimation exercise. 

Another example is from our customer Deliveroo.
They use JPD for their yearly planning and don't run many calculations (i.e. using formulas) but rather create a space for conversations around disciplines required to ship an idea and what that would look like in terms of absolute headcount (e.g. 1 developer per sprint : 10 Abs. Headcount = 10 developers for 1 sprint or 1 developer for 10 sprints). View #2 from the blog post is inspired from their usage of JPD in that context.

For context, Deliveroo = 85 squads distributed across 16 domains.
The planning exercise is across all teams.

See an example here

Using this dimension of developer per sprint means that, for a specific domain (here the Advertising group), they can drop cards on a timeline view and see what the scenario would look like if they tackled a set of ideas above their prioritisation line. (see below)

A couple of thoughts:

Capacity planning is often done on  quarterly, bi-annual or yearly basis. When teams are trying to estimate work at these horizons, it often means there is a lot of uncertainty around the work (in one of my past roles working in a bank on the mobile platform team, we used to do an early +/- 100% estimate, meaning a Medium-sized job could also turn out to be a Small or a Large), because we haven't started or completed the discovery work, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. I'm not sure how helpful this exercise was, specially given the amount of time it took from the whole team, that we could have invested in shipping for our customers.

Teams that build in the fact that estimates are just that, can usually move forward faster and fall into the trap of turning estimation sessions into an academic exercise. Instead, they focus on the work at hand and work iteratively. 

You might have already seen that this is a topic we're planning to pick up on in our public roadmap here:
https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-Product-Discovery-articles/What-are-we-up-to-Public-roadmap-for-Jira-Product-Discovery/ba-p/2880405

Hope this helps. :)

Axel — PM Evangelist on the JPD Team