What's the best way to link a Design Task to a Discovery ticket?

[Bruno Cambraia]

I’m looking for best practices or suggestions on how to link a Design ticket (e.g., in Jira) to something that’s still in the Discovery stage.

The challenge: the item hasn’t moved into Delivery yet, as we still need to validate the idea. However, the design work is already in progress, and it’s important for the team to track and understand its progress — even if it's not officially committed to delivery.

Has anyone found a good way to reflect this in Jira or similar workflows? Should it be linked to an Epic, Initiative, or is there a better approach for visibility during this early phase?

Thanks in advance!

[Tanguy Crusson · Accepted solution]

Hi! we now have a new answer for this if you're using the Premium plan of Jira Product Discovery - you can use it to manage discovery tasks: 

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-Product-Discovery-articles/New-manage-discovery-tasks-in-JPD-needs-the-Premium-plan/ba-p/3044161#M3421

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Bruno Cambraia and welcome to the Community!

There won't be a one size fits all answer to this question, as much depends on how you are organised and what you use your (Atlassian) tools for across your workflow.

As a solution partner, we see and consult many companies on how to streamline their workflows.

Some have dedicated design teams that have an organised backlog of design tasks in a separate Jira project where they create separate tasks for each individual design item they work on. It's an essential part of their work management; they add deadlines to it, describe the desired outcomes in there, even log their time spent against it, ...

Other companies focus on the content of their work, doing design work in e.g. Figma and documenting the (con)textual part of it in a Confluence page linked to the JPD idea. Having the link between the idea and the content they deliver is all they really need to make sure their ideas (prioritised in JPD) are worked on and brought to the point where they become actual delivery items (later on). These actually use the JPD ideas themselves and their design tools to determine what to work on.

In the middle are organisations that don't heavily rely on Jira tasks to plan their work, but do have internal processes around time tracking and registration in place where they want to report on time spent on design work. These may have one (or some) design work items in place just for high level time tracking.

No matter what scenario resembles your organisation the most, it's important to consider your overall workflow and match a potential implementation to that. When you say:

The challenge: the item hasn’t moved into Delivery yet, as we still need to validate the idea. However, the design work is already in progress, and it’s important for the team to track and understand its progress — even if it's not officially committed to delivery.

... it would be a bit contradictory to want to monitor its delivery progress. Simply linking a Jira item or the Confluence page to the JPD should allow you to monitor design progress, in those linked items rather than in your JPD view. I would expect you to have a (continuous) review process in place to monitor progress of the design items currently worked on, as I would expect these being focused primarily on the ideas that are approaching the delivery stage (or at least the assessment of their feasability).

Nothing stops you from creating a delivery epic early on with a design task in it neither, if that fits better with your team's workflow. That would indeed allow you to track 'delivery' progress early on inside JPD - even if you're not delivering anything except the preparation work. I would just recommend not to create any 'delivery' work items before you are sure that they are going to be worked on. It's a lot of wast(ed time) if you have to cancel them again if it turns out they're not going to be worked on afterwards after all.

Hope this helps!