JPD Performance Limitations?

Question

I'm in the beta for Jira Product Discovery and have '20 product teams and growing' split into 2 product areas. I would like to turn the discovery Kanban board into an operational portfolio to manage our high level ideas from inception to delivery.

If I create 2 separate projects for each product area, then I fear I won't be able to see the "big picture" of both projects combined.  There doesn't appear to be a way to visualize 2 separate Jira Discovery projects on the same pane of glass effectively (let me know if this is incorrect please).

Therefore, I'm leaning towards having all product teams in a single discovery project, but separating things using different filters and views by product area.

Since all incoming ideas will hit this project, I was wondering what the max limitations are before I will start seeing performance degradation.  i.e. how many idea cards on a jira product discovery project is too many?  I'm going to add another 10 or so teams in the next 2 years and don't want to design us into a corner if this approach is unsustainable.

Jack Arndt · Answer

Thank you for the response @Tanguy Crusson !

I agree 1000 ideas would be a bad idea on a single board. I was wondering more if we had 1000 ideas archived, sent to DONE, or merged, would see a performance hit?

I’m less concerned about sharing views since you made the great update that prevents users from saving a view for all users. That being said, is there a max amount of views (I’m using high level nesting categories to organize them) that will cause us challenges if we exceed? Right now I have 25 views under 6 categories and it seems stable.

Tanguy Crusson · Answer

Hi @Jack Arndt , if you are talking about 20 product teams and growing to 10, I would definitely recommend splitting into multiple projects. We have quite a few customers in that configuration. The main issue you'll find otherwise is people are going to start making changes that clash with each other in the configuration of the views, and that's going to frustrate everyone.

The main value in using a single project is when you have a couple/small number of teams that work on ideas/opportunities that overlap a lot with each other, with a lot of collaboration between the teams. Otherwise it's best to leave each team to use the fields and views that works best for them (even if you agree on a set of fields of views that are common to everyone). The most successful teams using the product constantly change this configuration to keep improving the prioritization process.

The main drawback of using multiple projects is configuration overhead as we don't - yet - support sharing fields and views between projects (but it's on our radar).

@Jeny Stoeva I think your use case was a bit special as you're trying to use the product to track individual pieces of feedback as ideas (so, as a result, very granular ideas and a lot of them) and we don't recommend that. We recommend tracking initiatives/epic level things in Jira Product Discovery instead - basically potential investments where you want to debate the priorities and put them in roadmaps you can share with the rest of the company.

I'd agree with Jenya that more than 1000 ideas would probably be problematic at this stage (we have very few - last I checked a handful - of customers doing that today). At this stage though I would think that a cleanup might be necessary. E.g. to merge related ideas and maybe archive the super low value ones, or revisit the level of granularity of ideas. Because you want product discussions to be about the why and what's going to make an impact! And in my opinion it's harder to do if it's centered on things that are at the level of a story or task.

Jeny Stoeva · Answer

hi @Jack Arndt ,

I guess someone from the Atlassian JPD team will answer your question more thoroughly  since they are very helpful and I can share my current experience and the feedback I got from them.

I was told that JPD was intended to track ideas on a high level and collect the customer insights about those broad ideas but as it seems many of us saw the opportunity do use JPD as a single place to collect, organise and track ideas and customer feedback within the company. The fact that it is seamlessly integrated with Jira is a big plus and something I personally was missing for a long time.

That said, JPD has some performance issues currently which Atlassian shared will be addressed sooner than later. When there are a lot of ideas (above 1000 and talking from experience here) in a single project the views are loading slowly, might crash sometimes too. I would say it is not that bad. What is more problematic for me is that the single/multi select fields are very slow to work with when you have a lot of predefined values in those, we have close to a thousand options to select from.

And to be fair, the project is still i beta and we went using it with open eyes about those issues. Also the benefits from it are currently worth being patient about the performance. Hope my feedback helps :)