I was quite excited to see Jira Product Discovery- it lined up with an initiative to get our internal idea management off of a different platform and into Jira.
I've ported everything over, but some of the decisions in JPD make me question the logic of it as a product and the envisioned use-case.
Our use case is to capture all the internal ideas our staff would like to submit for review and possible implementation. Voting seemed like one really nice feature we would gain, but the logic of voting in JPD makes no sense to me.
You can't replenish votes, you can't limit how many votes someone can have per issue, and you can't set a time period for how long users can use a specific voting field.
According to @Rohan Swami here:
... most customers are using the voting feature as part of a collaboration session ... It's a point-in-time activity.
This is baffling to me, given the way the JPD works currently. Every time you want to have a session of voting, you are expected to make a new field? Is everyone just polluting their projects with dozens of voting fields? The workaround in that thread says to make a new field every quarter.
So you just have a whole bunch of voting fields on every idea? If an idea crosses over from one quarter to another, and you want to know the total amount of votes, are you supposed to just add up all the votes from all the fields and ask your users nicely not to use fields from previous quarters?
The most sensible form of voting, to me, would be the way it works in other Jira projects- 1 vote per issue, unlimited votes per user. However, I could come up with viable ways to use this, if I had any of the following:
- Archive voting fields while retaining their votes
- Replenish votes, with a maximum number per idea and total per user
- Control which fields were visible on ideas
Since we have none of this, I really can't see how this could be useful to most people, beyond having a bunch of ephemeral JPD projects that don't last long.
Am I completely off-base here? Have I missed something obvious?
To be clear, I see the value of a field that implements dot-voting (though less-so if you can't archive it). It just seems counterintuitive to me that the regular voting system, which seems much more broadly relevant, be removed entirely when its replacement seems less broadly relevant.
Dot voting feels niche, something I'd want to do under a specific circumstance.
There are some other oddities to JPD too, like the fact that I can't control what fields appear during idea creation or which ones are required, though at least this can be worked around by ingesting ideas into Jira over the API via something like Slack or a Google Form.
