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How Doodle left the feature factory behind with Jira Product Discovery - a customer story

John McKiernan

Hey JPD community!

We recently had a great conversation with one of our customers, Doodle, to discuss how Jira Product Discovery helped them transition from a feature factory to a realm of innovation and beautiful product experiences.

Stephanie Leue, Chief Product Officer, and Jens Naie, Chief Technology Officer were generous enough to have a long chat with me, covering various topics that many of you may find enjoyable or insightful, including:

How product, engineering, and all teams at Doodle collaborate using JPD.
The framework they adopted to integrate with Jira Product Discovery.
An entertaining recount of Stephanie’s first day at Doodle.
The positive psychological effects on the team since adopting JPD.
The significant increase in transparency across the business.
The reallocation of 50% of resources to innovation (compared to 10% before JPD).

I have included the main recording (30 minutes) below along with some smaller two-minute snippets. Stay tuned for a more extensive written case study, which the team will share in the next few weeks. In the meantime, enjoy this conversation, and feel free to let us know your thoughts!

Main video (30 mins): How Doodle left the feature factory behind with Jira Product Discovery

Short snippets for those with TikTok attention spans:

P.S - if you don’t know Doodle - you should! Doodle is the fastest and easiest way to schedule anything — from meetings to the next great collaboration. I’ve used it for scheduling events at work offsites and am a big fan. You can also follow Doodle on Linkedin.

Comments

Rick Kleinschmidt

Amazing!
Currently watching the full interview and enjoying it a lot!

Filip Callewaert_a5ele2

Great talk! Thx for sharing here!

Stephanie Leue_jl6b5t

Thanks @joh for reflecting on our journey with us! It's been a pleasure. JPD is a game-changer for us!!!

Filip Callewaert_a5ele2

Nice to have you in this channel, @Stephanie Leue !! You amazed me a full 30 minutes with your insights. Such an authentic story must be gold for Atlassian and the JPD team!

Tanguy Crusson

@Filip Callewaert you got that right 🙂

When we started this journey 3+ years ago, we talked to many, many product managers and could feel their pain. We wrote down what we believed we wanted to help with. We never thought a tool would be the answer, that it would need to be a tool alongside better ways of working. One where teams would stop churning features and instead be empowered to step back and look at the WHY, being honest about learnings, and balancing everything from business to product to engineering to operations. We have a saying internally that we want to turn PM from a solo endeavour to a team sport.

We were in awe hearing of @Stephanie Leue and Doodle's powerful transformation journey 😍 and so proud that JPD could be part of it.

Filip Callewaert_a5ele2

@Tanguy Crusson here, and @Stephanie Leue in the video both introduce an interesting (almost philosophical) question about the role of tools in building effective teams @ work. I always also have the tendency to say 'it's not about tools'. Still, after having said this, I do always add: "but the tools in any case are not innocent". Tools enable or disable. Interesting to hear how Stephanie refers to other tools they explored, that "did not work". The challenge indeed is to design a working combination of tools, people('s habits, mindsets, ...) and processes (Atlassian prefers 'practices').

But Stephanie's revelation is exactly about how tools/processes/mindsets have the potential to become 'one': the tool = the process = the mindset/the culture = the tool = the process = ... (a rose is a rose is a rose). And that is what may happen once in a while: that a tool itself is revolutionary in building this 'one force' that is exactly what we all were looking for. Also so interesting to hear how JPD fills a void between Jira as such (Jira Software I presume), and the business and users.

I only see a very promising future for JPD, its team and its users. I guess Atlassian has a new star on its firmament.

I need to rewatch that video for still more inspiration. Such rich info!

Ivan Ferreira_31ou4g

This is fantastic! Great session!

Mirko Grahnert_p1eahn

Thanks for a super insightful interview.

@Stephanie Leue I would love to understand how are you mapping your strategic items to your initiatives. Is all of this happening inside of JPD? If so, what mechanism do you use to differentiate between the two, given that JPD currently doesn't support different issue types and/or hierarchies?

Stephanie Leue_jl6b5t

@Mirko Grahnert Our process consists of 5 stages. Strategy is the first stage on our Kanban in JPD and we link initiatives to strategy items (using "relates to).

Since we use it as a Company Portfolio, other departments contributing to the strategic goals link their initiatives as well, so that we can see across all departments who contribute to the bigger picture.

There are two main challenges:

1. In the discovery phase, we're having a list of problems; those are broken down into hypotheses, and only validated hypotheses become initiatives. Hence, we started this quarter to track problems and hypotheses on another board. That's not optimal, and we're experimenting with it.

2. Every strategic objective is tied to a key result. We're adding those as labels to the strategic initiative and tracking progress in another tool. That's fine for us, because JPD was never meant to be a company portfolio tool or an OKR tool, so we tweak it

This is our process at a glance:

Group 91 (2).png

David Nadri

@Stephanie Leue - thanks for the insights! The video talks a lot about key topics, such as transparency in JPD.

For example, in How Doodle tripled transparency across the business, you talk about how everything is visible from JPD - what we're working on, progress, dependencies, etc are all visible to you without having to ask your team.

Could you please share what this transparency actually looks like in JPD? If you could share some screenshots of the main JPD views (blurring out anything sensitive) to see how they're configured, that would be super helpful!

David Nadri

Hi @Stephanie Leue @Jens Naie - following up on my question in my previous comment! Appreciate your response, because we need this badly! If anyone else has an answer to this, feel free to weigh in!

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