[Announcement] More flexible timeline views are here!

[#1]

Hi everyone!

Many of you asked us to take timeline views to the next level to better tell the story of your product plans: displaying cards over any timeframe, displaying key moments of your product plans in a prominent fashion, fitting more ideas on the screen to more easily present them in meetings.

We are exciting to announce a new version of the timeline view that addresses all the above!

Make ideas span any timeframe, with the new fine-grain time axis

When configuring a timeline view, you select a month or quarter timescale. This will make JPD split time in calendar months or calendar quarters. Now, when on the quarter timescale, we will display an additional breakdown of quarters into months. When on the month timescale, we will display an additional breakdown of months into mid-months.

When building your timeline, ideas can now span across months and quarters, or start and end in mid-month, making your timeline reflect more precisely the aspirational target dates for your ideas. For example the idea "Search by email senders" spans mid-May 2024 to mid-Nov 2024, across 3 quarters.

Never miss a key moment, with time markers

Product managers track product initiatives with rough timeframes. “When is the new sign up flow shipping?”. The answer is usually “mid Q1”, “end of year”. However, some key moments are known far in advance and it’s critical not to miss them. “At which conference are we announcing this idea?” “At the annual conference on December 13th 2024”.

Now, you can display those moments front and center on your timeline views with time markers!

Time markers on timeline views let you mark with a colored losange a moment not to miss. Your annual conference, your email campaign, or your private and public beta releases can now be overlayed on your roadmaps, prominently at the top. Simply hover your time axis and pick the day of your choice to drop a time marker. Assign the color of your choice, and you’re done!

Fit more ideas in the screen, with the summary layout

Presenting roadmaps to senior stakeholders in the shape of a timeline is tricky. Senior stakeholders need to see the big picture of your roadmaps first, before drilling into details. With the new summary layout, you can now fit more ideas on your screen to show that big picture, minimizing the top-to-bottom scrolling.

The summary layout can be selected alongside compact and detailed layouts.

Now so much vertical spaces is freed! the card "SSO with Microsoft" is now appearing, while it was not before! 

The summary layout displays ideas as slim cards, with just its summary and exactly one other field from your view. To elect which field in the view gets displayed on your ideas in summary layout, click on the Fields menu, then press the star icon next to the field of your choice.

On hover over ideas, a pop-over will appear to display all the fields in the view, on the side of the cards. This way, your timeline views show just enough, while keeping within reach all the information you need to answer any question.

See it in action in this demo video!

In this Loom, I go through the step-by-step for using the above features.

The new timeline view is now rolled-out to all organizations for both the Free and Standard editions. We cannot wait to hear what you think.

Happy roadmapping!

Amina for the Jira Product Discovery team

[Eduardo Calvillo]

Great to see these improvements. I have two comments/suggestions:

1. For ideas that are shorter than 1 month, would it be possible to display the text better? I can not really see what it says for short ideas.

2. Atlas integrations: my start and end dates come from Atlas, but for some reason, for some projects the start date is shown as the same as the end date, even if in Atlas is different. It is defeating the objective of using Atlas to synch projects across Epics and JPD.

[jordan_leahy]

This is great :)

[Kostia]

@Eduardo Calvillo Hi! Kostia, engineer from Jira Product Discovery team here. Thanks for your feedback. Regarding Atlas fields, could you please provide more information about which dates are set in the Atlas project and what do you see in JPD when you open an idea? Do you have "Autofill dates" enabled for the date fields fields configuration sidebar in JPD like this?

It would be easier for us to communicate and fix the case for you if you open a support case via https://support.atlassian.com/contact and attach the screenshots with more info there. 

Appreciate a lot and sorry for inconvenience.

Kostia

[Eduardo Calvillo]

@Kostia Thanks for your answer. It is not letting me raise a ticket, it says that I have a free account, even though we have Standard accounts.

I am attaching the screenshots, you can see that the project start date shown in JPD is not the same start date I have selected in Atlas.

This does not happen to all projects, only to some.

[Landi]

Woohoo! 

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Eduardo Calvillo @Kostia That's because you can only use the Atlas project target date for this feature today - not the Atlas project start date. We'll add this option at some point. 

[Eduardo Calvillo]

@Tanguy Crusson thanks for the answer! 
Unfortunately it means I can not use the dates synch at this time :( Looking forward to the full integration of dates!

[Tanguy Crusson]

Thanks for the feedback @Eduardo Calvillo - in the meantime we'll rename "Atlas project" to "Atlas project target date" to remove confusion. Thanks for reporting this. 

[Adelyn Zamora]

It is great to see the improvements for the timeline view. How can I align the quarters to my fiscal year (Aug - July)?  We're currently using Project Start and Project End dates to define the timeline, but some of our ideas started prior to the fiscal start, so the quarters are off. 

[Solaiman, Raouf]

Same question as above -- looking to adjust quarters to align to fiscal (Feb-Jan) calendar. 

[Salah Murad]

is it possible to show dependencies between ideas/features in the timeline view (or any other view)? this is significantly important to guage the impact of priority change of one idea/feature on the rest of the roadmap.

[Andrew Darrant]

Hi - on your demo  you have ideas running on the same line (eg "Audit Logs for Account Deletion" is on same line as "Improve Email notifications") I can't work out how to make this happen on my timeline view?? All ideas have their own line - I have tried removing "Sort" and "Grouping" as I thought this may impact - but still the same....

[Salah Murad]

The timeline doesn't reflect the correct start date. It only show the Idea Card either from the beginning of the month or Mid of the month. I cannot show the card anytime in between.

Timeline Fields:

Test 1 Card:

Test 2 Card:

Timeline showing same timeframe for both cards:

[Nabeel Ahmed Iqbal]

Really helpful update to the timelines 

[awang]

+1 please make quarters timeframes customizable 

[Kostia]

@Andrew Darrant Sorting prevents from moving cards on the timeline. When you don't have sorting enabled, is drag-and-drop disabled for you? Could you please check ? 

[Kostia]

@Salah Murad Hi! Thanks for your feedback. In timeline of Jira Product Discovery all ideas snap to beginning/end or mid-month, this is expected limitation that we have. 

[Andrew Darrant]

@Kostia the works thanks - didn't realise you could drag and drop.

[Samantha Ortiz]

This is great! Is there any way to view the timeline of delivery tickets linked to an idea all in one place? Meaning, a timeline view grouped by idea, with a dropdown view of the associated delivery ticket timelines.

[Damon Mirate]

This is great. We are just starting to work in Product Discovery. Are there plans for the timeline to be condensed even further? When looking at larger projects from a high level that take longer than a year, it would be fantastic if we have even larger chunks of time (i.e., 6 month or even full year scale). 

Thanks!

[Jessica Larrabee]

Exporting to JPEG is really hard to see! Is there a way to add more contrast on the cards versus the timeline? Is there a way to configure this already? The white timeline summary cards against light grey background is nearly impossible to see in JPEG to share with others or put in PPTs, rendering it unusable essentially. If that contrast can be changed, more likely will use this for those who don't have time to create accounts or access the internet (ex: Airplane Mode while traveling)

[Georgianne Rogers]

Hello! Is the Customizable fiscal year functionality available? It was mentioned in the Early access program for enhanced timeline views announcement , but not here. I don't see a way to configure in the product.