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Early Access Program: new integration with Jira Plans (ex Advanced Roadmaps)

Tanguy Crusson

We've started an EAP for the new integration with Jira Plans

Many of you asked us how to use Jira Product Discovery alongside Jira Plans. We've been working on an integration that brings these two closer together.

Update on 18 July:

We've given early access to about 100 customers who asked on this post up until a few days ago (if we could locate your site based on the URL you provided). If you have access you should see a notification about it in JPD when you open an idea. To give us feedback about the integration: you can just add a comment to this article.

Limitations:

Ideas are not editable in Plans, only via JPD
Idea preview on hover only show issue key and summary, not other fields yet
Up to 1000 Ideas are supported in a Plan, not a single more
Group by Idea: Idea header might be empty if the data inaccessible
Group by Idea: groups are not alphabetically sorted
PNG export: Ideas might be missing in preview

For everyone else: once we're done with this round of testing, we'll progressively roll it out to everyone. Thank you for your patience.

How it works

Here's how it works in a nutshell:

When you're ready to start delivery for an idea, you link the idea to delivery tickets from Jira (in the idea's Delivery panel)

The idea doesn't belong to the Plans hierarchy. Instead it becomes available as a field on the delivery ticket in Jira Plans. You can see a demo for this here.

Which means that you can filter and group by that field:

You can then keep the dates on the delivery ticket and on the idea in sync. To do that you configure the idea’s date fields to be automatically overridden by the epic/initiative’s date fields once the idea has corresponding delivery tickets. This way, any change on the epic coming from the team’s work will be immediately reflected back on the timeline:

When to use a roadmap, when to use a plan

Here's how we've designed the model:

In Jira Product Discovery you handle your product backlog, prioritize ideas and create roadmaps. These roadmaps communicate how and why each idea was prioritized. You can easily share these roadmaps with everyone in your company, your customers and partners.

When it comes to delivering these commitments, you use the rest of Jira. You create corresponding epic(s)/initiative(s) for each idea, you break them down in user stories, tasks and subtasks, and try to map out how everything will fit together in Jira Plans - dependencies, team constraints, estimations, more detailed planning if the sequencing is tricky, etc.

Timeline view

You can use dates and visualise ideas on a roadmap using the timeline view in JPD. To be honest, we’re not big fans of this approach in the JPD team. We much prefer the Now/Next/Later format as we find it sets up better conversations with stakeholders and “when is X going to ship?” is rarely the most useful topic to discuss with them. That being said, every company is different and we know that for some of you it’s not an option.

We recommend you use a timeline view with a high level of granularity: focus on the important ideas, don’t go too granular - the goal is to help you communicate a high level roadmap to your stakeholders, without going in the details tasks and sub-tasks.

Before you ask: the dates on this view are completely made up - we don't use timelines in the JPD team 🙂

How to use Now/Next/Later with timelines

Time-based roadmaps can be useful when other teams depend on your work or when sharing information with marketing and key account executives, as long as they understand how to communicate the level of confidence and commitment. However when the view is not designed properly, it may project a sense of certainty far into the future and set the wrong expectations.

For example, this roadmap is most likely misleading: big projects far into the future - the team probably has a good idea of what’s going to happen in the next 3 to 6 months, but that certainty goes down over time:

We recommend combining a Now/Next/Later roadmap with a timeline roadmap to tell a more honest story.

The Now/Next/Later roadmap makes it clear what is currently committed with enough certainty
Every idea in the “Now” column is plotted on a timeline view to give a rough idea of when it’s going to land (month or quarter)

Comments

Tanguy Crusson

Here's an example for how to ask for access:

We'd like access because... [please list reasons so we can understand your context]

Site URL: xyz.atlassian.net

Paul Saunders_dj6ygr

We'd like access please. We heavily use Product Discovery and Jira Plans across our business. This integration closes the loop between Product Management and Delivery for us. It's a no-brainer

Site URL: vistair.atlassian.net

Thanks

Andrew Sanyal_ezcjob

Hi

We'd like to be part of the trial please as we are working on integrating Ideas & Plans - and the easier we can make this the more buy-in we can get.

Site URL; optalysys.atlassian.net

Thanks

Andrew

lauren.sinyard

We'd absolutely love to use this functionality! We're using the JPD product for idea gathering and prioritisation, we then use it as the base for our PI Planning and being able to run Jira Plans off the back of this would massively streamline the current workaround we've put in place as a placeholder.

Site: https://atgglobal.atlassian.net/

Ward Meremans VRT

We would also like to have access, because we use Jira Discovery extensively and want to link our product roadmap more clearly to our Jira delivery tickets.

Site URL: vrt-prod.atlassian.net

Thanks!

Ward

Fredrik Holmstrom

Hello I would love to test this as well @Tanguy Crusson

URL: https://uat-givaudan.atlassian.net/

Tanguy Crusson

@Fredrik Holmstrom and everyone new: reminder that we need the site URL, thanks.

Mart Postma

Hi @Tanguy Crusson,

As usual, very cool to see the way JPD integrates with more and more products of Atlassian. We would like to use this feature to gain better insights in the way ideas and their delivery tickets depend on one another, as well as to take the planning aspect out of JPD and do that in Jira Plans. This will enable us to use JPD for discovery and idea tracking and Jira Plans for the actual planning and delivery.

Site: -

Thanks!

Math_pbyhme

Hi Tanguy and team,

We would like access because we already have our backlog in JPD, and currently use a view with multiple columns to simulate a timeline representing the next quarter (for commitment and resource allocation). It would be awesome to try out the native proposal for this use case.

Site URL: alohihq.atlassian.net

Matt Ford_40uvqz

Hi there - I'd love to test this. We've been creating separate 'Initiatives' in plans but would be great to connect the two.

Site URL: lumarhq.atlassian.net

Thanks!

Matt

Ahmet Yılmaz_z218rx

Hi Tanguy,

We want to improve the visibility of our Mobile and Web applications' release schedule by making it accessible via Product Discovery. Currently, we share the release calendar through email and Slack channels, but this approach does not provide immediate access to all stakeholders. We believe a Product Discovery view will facilitate a more asynchronous and accessible release schedule.

Site URL: migrosone.atlassian.net

Former user

Hi Tanguy,

We'd love access as we continue adopting JPD across the org, and are looking at using Plans to improve our portfolio... planning . We love JPD and can see this integration adding a ton of value.

Site: https://1eonline.atlassian.net

Thanks in advance!

Yves Bauer

Hi, we'd like access because we adopt product discovery for our global and customer specific roadmaps. All ideas feed into our engineering planning.

procureai.atlassian.net

Rob Russell_bb2qru

Hi @Tanguy Crusson We'd like access because working to rollout JPD across all our teams but there is a question being pushed back as to why do you need JPD and advanced roadmaps. Having JPD ideas within Advanced roadmaps really visualises the context of the work that is being carried out and why. I also feel it will increase the adoption of JPD as people see the seamless integration

Site URL: sliide.atlassian.net

Modestas Garliauskas

We'd like access because:

- we use Jira Plans quite heavily, but it always lacked relation to what the epics contribute

- and this is one of the main reasons why we as an org are having hard time to use Discovery more and get all advantages out of it

Site URL: nordsec.atlassian.net

Edmund Walsh_th2dxm

Hey - we'd love to access this. It'd fill a neat hole we have in visualising the work that is included in projects, including both initial discovery tasks and also showing the link between ideas and epics (and giving the former visibility).

Site URL: https://nextgreencar.atlassian.net/

Thanks!

212462653

We'd like access because we are about to start planning next train where a clearer timeline and breakdown of deliverables across teams, is requested.

Site URL: pochh.atlassian.net

Oliver Murray_xoraw3

We'd like access please
wildbrain-spark.atlassian.net

We are looking to find better ways to sync with our delivery team (date sync sounds good) whilst being able to provide a internal stakeholder friendly roadmap maintained in JPD. We aren't big users of Plans yet but partly because of sync concerns. Seeing dependencies in Plans would be a big bonus, ideally we'd we like that on both sides.

@Tanguy Crusson I'd be very interested to hear any future plans / thoughts to help display and align hierarchies across both products. Our JPD tickets are not always initiative or theme based, but I would like to group them as such and display those levels on the JPD roadmap. I know your teams stance is to keep high level in JPD, but as you say every team / company is different

Van haegenberg Joris

Hi @Tanguy Crusson , we're interested at https://mediahuis.atlassian.net/

We're avid users of Advanced Roadmaps/Plans in our delivery organisation and it has become a standard in its SAFE-ish wow. Our product discovery process however, is quite disconnected atm. We've been using JPD since it was a beta in our product organization, (on a personal account since we only moved to JIRA Cloud this weekend) but it is a hassle to stay connected with the rest of the organisation

Nice contribution to Lenny's Podcast btw!

Sóley Þórisdóttir

Hi,
We'd like access, please. We've set up a comprehensive JDP project for our Product discovery and this would add and contribute to the increased transparency to our organization we're striving for.
controlant.atlassinan.net

Joost Zeegers

Hi,

We'd like access please. We are using JPD for our discovery roadmap (preferably without a timeline) and use Plans for our delivery roadmap and work breakdown. We expect that visibility of Ideas within Plans will keep the 2 better connected, thus making the life of product management easier.

Site: https://eriksdigital.atlassian.net/

Ronnie Batten

Hi

We'd like access please as we've been using Plans for a while to track roadmap delivery and are now starting to use Product Discovery so would like to see how we can track from ideation to delivery in one timeline.

Site: prettylittlething.atlassian.net

Gilad Waldman

Would love to try as well

https://islandio.atlassian.net/

Thank you!

Ginni

Hi, We would live to try this as it will our business see even more value from JIRA as a whole. We are also wanting to bring more of our business teams in to using JIRA and some teams would find this view incredibly powerful.

we are currently looking at ways to visualise our work from idea inception to launch and beyond to give our senior stakeholders full transparency

Thank you

Site URL : luno.atlassian.com

Parm Sangha

Hello!

We're currently trying to move off powerpoint for sharing details with executive stakeholders. This requires us to manage content in JPD & powerpoints. It would be great if we can house ideas, timelines, and costs within JIRA for both JPD and timelines!

Site: https://betterway.atlassian.net/

Phil James

We are amongst those that have asked for this feature including feeding back usescases to product support. very pleased to see it has not fallen on deaf ears!

Instance: https://ledgerhq.atlassian.net/

We would like to review these feature capabilities to cover 2 main usecases:

From an ideas level be able to identify and visualise on a timeline/gantt all Epics across multiple JSW spaces, facilitating critical path and dependancy mapping.

Investigate if we have an issue type hierarchy of Objectives, Initiatives, Ideas and Epics with objects linked "is child/parent of" to what degree we can create a plan based on a given Initiative and illustrate all linked objects below.

Phil Dowling

Hello!

I have been using JPD extensively to plan development in our organization, linkage to plans would greatly assist with that planning and communicating with executives.

Site: https://maxwellmerchantsolutions.atlassian.net/

Romain VELON

Hello @Tanguy Crusson

That's good news as a first step. But my joy was not totally satisfied when I read "Ideas will not be included in the hierarchy". Is there any roadmap for this Feature?

Most of my clients (I am a Solution partner) want to include it in the hierarchy. For example they have a strategic objective for the company that will lead to some ideas and then some delivery. OKR is an issuetype which is a parent of the Idea and the Idea is the parent of the Epic.

I would be awesome to have the Idea issuetype in the hierarchy. Thank you.

Romain

Vasiliy Ganchev_ouey53

we want to give it a try
https://wildix.atlassian.net/

Hamish Pollock Fraser

Hello - We would also really like to try out this new feature. We have deployed Jira JDP and Plans to help us get a Rail Operating Company to become fully operational and assume operations for a North American commuter rail network.
https://onxpress.atlassian.net/