Want to collect external ideas for Jira Product Discovery — from customers, stakeholders, or partners who don't use Jira? The best product suggestions rarely come from inside your team, yet Jira Product Discovery (JPD) lives behind a license most of these people will never have.
If your organization uses Confluence to document centralize knowledge or public site, there’s a practical way to bridge the gap: embed a form into your Confluence page that automatically creates JPD ideas from submitted responses.
What is Jira Product Discovery?
Jira Product Discovery (JPD) is Atlassian's tool for capturing, prioritizing, and managing product ideas before they turn into development work. It gives product teams one place to collect ideas, attach supporting evidence, and decide what to build next. The catch: JPD is designed for internal product teams, so the customers and stakeholders with the most valuable input usually have no way to add ideas directly — which is exactly the gap a form solves.
Why This Matters
Using Jira and Confluence together to collect ideas
Jira and Confluence work best as a pair: Confluence is where teams, customers, and partners already read and collaborate, while Jira Product Discovery is where ideas get prioritized. Embedding an idea intake form on a Confluence page connects the two — every response submitted in Confluence becomes a structured JPD idea in Jira automatically. The person submitting stays in Confluence and needs no Jira access at all.
Product teams often rely on email, Slack, or other feedback source to gather ideas from sales, support, or customers. This results in:
- Missed insights due to lack of visibility
- Manual effort to reformat and enter data into Jira
- Ideas disconnected from source context or stakeholder priority
Embedding a form in Confluence creates a structured intake channel for new ideas while allowing stakeholders to remain in the tools they already use.
This is one of several ways to open up idea intake — see the full overview in 4 Practical Ways to Collect Jira Product Discovery Ideas from Everyone.
How It Works
You’ll use Smart Forms for Jira, an app that integrates with your Jira instance (including JPD), to:
- Build a form that captures the relevant product feedback or ideas
- Embed that form directly into a Confluence page
- Automatically create a new Idea issue type in Jira Product Discovery upon submission
- Route form element data to the correct fields (e.g., summary, description, labels)
Step-by-Step: Creating an Idea Intake Form in Confluence
Step 1: Design the Form
In Smart Forms, build a form tailored to your team’s product discovery process. Common fields might include:
- Idea title (mapped to summary)
- Problem statement
- Proposed solution
- Product area or team
- Impact level or priority
- Optional file upload
You can include field types like dropdowns, checkboxes, text areas, and more.
Deciding what to capture as a field vs. a form? See Designing Jira Intake in 2026: When to Use a Field vs. a Form.
Step 2: Create new idea and Map Form Fields to JPD Fields
In the form’s settings, enable “Create new issue” and select your JPD project and “Idea” issue type.
Then map form responses to corresponding Jira fields:
- “Idea title” → Summary
- “Detailed description” → Description
- “Product Area” → Custom field
- “Source” → Label or hidden field
Unmapped fields won’t appear in the idea, but all responses will be saved in the form’s Responses tab for full traceability. And you can analyze that responses with build-in report as well as export to exel or pdf.
Step 3: Embed the Form in Confluence
Smart Forms provides a link you can place in iFrame Confluence macro that lets you place the form directly into any Confluence page — for example:
- A shared Product Feedback space
- Internal Sales or Support team wiki
- Partner-facing portals or knowledge hubs
Forms can also be shared externally using a secure public link, if needed.
🔍 Step 4 (Optional): Use Hidden Fields and Default Values
To tag ideas by source or submitter group, use:
- Hidden fields (e.g., “Submitted via Confluence”)
- Pre-filled dropdowns to eliminate errors or simplify the form
This helps maintain structured data without increasing form complexity for users.
To tag where each idea came from without asking the user, add a hidden field — full guide here: How to Use Hidden Fields in Jira Forms.
Example Use Cases
Use Case | Value |
|---|
Customer feedback intake | Collect feature requests from customers via intuitive portal with form |
Support escalations | Capture recurring issues without requiring Jira access |
Internal idea sharing | Allow any employee to submit suggestions in a centralized space |
Partner product feedback | Provide controlled input from select vendors or clients |
If your customers already use a JSM portal, you can also let them submit ideas from there — see How to Let JSM Customers Submit JPD Feature Requests Without JPD Access.
What to Keep in Mind
- This method uses the Smart Forms for Jira app, not native Confluence or JPD capabilities
- Only mapped fields will populate in JPD ideas, but you can include full responses in the Description field if needed
- Submissions are also stored in the form’s Responses tab, so you maintain a full audit trail
- This app works with all Jira projects, JSM, JPD.
Summary
For organizations managing idea discovery at scale, enabling structured input from non-Jira users is essential. Embedding a form in Confluence allows teams to:
- Capture structured feedback from across the organization
- Automatically route it into Jira Product Discovery
- Maintain clean, mappable data for prioritization
- Reduce the overhead of manual intake or multiple tool switching
If you’re looking to standardize and scale your product discovery intake process, this approach helps you meet contributors where they already work — while keeping the product team focused on what matters: evaluating and shipping the right ideas.
