Frequently asked questions - about the product (how do I...?)

[#1]

Licensing questions

What are the different types of users, and who needs to pay? 

Read this: Creators, Contributors and Stakeholders.

How do I add contributors to a Jira Product Discovery project if they don't have a Jira license? 

Head over to our documentation to learn everything you need about contributors and how to create a contributor group. 

All site administrators are consuming a license, why?

You need to remove Jira Product Discovery product access from the site-admins user group. Details here: read this if you're a site administrator and added Jira Product Discovery Free or Standard.

Are Jira Product Discovery users billable under Atlassian Guard? 

Creators who only have a license for Jira Product Discovery aren't billable under Atlassian Guard for the moment. Contributors and stakeholders (as long as they don't hold another Atlassian product license) aren't billable either, even when synced via SCIM. You can enforce SSO for these users - this doesn't make them billable. Learn more about your Guard bill.

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Product questions

🆕 Where can I learn more about the upcoming Premium plan of Jira Product Discovery?

Check out the JPD Premium Plan FAQ.

Is there a public roadmap for Jira Product Discovery?

Yes, you can find it here: JPD public roadmap.

(and yes, it was created with JPD 🙂)

What do I use Jira Product Discovery for?

You use Jira product discovery as your product backlog where you: 

• Capture product ideas (and opportunities, solutions, etc.), relevant feedback and insights
• Prioritize the ideas that will make an impact
• Create and share product roadmaps with internal and external stakeholders
• Get a helicopter view of the progress of delivery

How do I get started?

We wrote a handbook that explains what JPD is for, the ways of working that come with it, and how you can adopt it in your product management team:

Atlassian Product Discovery handbook or (download the PDF)

To help get you started here are a few demo videos:

• 2min intro to the product
• 16min full demo illustrating the different scenarios you can use it for 
• 30min webinar: how to get started with Jira Product Discovery
• 30min conference talk with live demo: how the team creating JPD uses it for user feedback, prioritization, roadmapping
• 1h webinar: how to uplevel your product discovery practice with Jira Product Discovery. Learn from the Head of Product for Jira Product Discovery how his team handles product feedback, builds product roadmaps, creates a loop between discovery and delivery, and communicates progress to stakeholders.
• 1h webinar: How to connect discovery and delivery in Jira. Learn real-world examples of how to do discovery and delivery together and connect them on the same Jira platform.

This hands-on guide will explain how to use product features: Jira Product Discovery product guide. 

You can access product documentation here: Jira Product Discovery support.

How do I use Jira Product Discovery with Jira for delivery (ex Jira Software)?

Here's a demo

See this section of the Atlassian Product Discovery handbook as well

How do I use Jira Product Discovery and Jira Plans together?

See this section of the Atlassian Product Discovery handbook.

And a 12min Loom that explains how to use them together.

How do I use Jira Product Discovery with Goals and Projects (ex Atlas)?

Here is a demo for how to use Atlas goals and projects in Jira Product Discovery

How do I use Jira Product Discovery with Confluence?

You can use Confluence with Jira Product Discovery for 3 use cases:

• Capturing insights from pages, e.g. from customer interviews.
• Writing specifications/one-pagers
• Publishing your roadmap to the rest of the company

Here is a demo for how to use Confluence and Jira Product Discovery

How do I use Project Automation in Jira Product Discovery?

See this post

We have multiple products and teams. Should we use one project or multiple? 

This depends on many factors.

• It's possible to use a single project to share between teams/products, especially when there's a high level of collaboration required between these teams. 
• You can also use multiple projects

If you are using the Free or Standard plans of Jira Product Discovery:

Demo: using a single project for multiple products and teams with the Standard plan

If you are using the Premium plan, you have more features we created specifically for the purpose of helping you set up many teams collaborating in many projects with the ability to get visibility centrally:

Product guide: setting up JPD for many teams with the Premium plan

How can we use Jira Product Discovery to collect feedback from customers/users and other teams (support, sales, customer success, marketing)?

Check out this section of the Atlassian Product Discovery handbook

We have only partially tackled the job of creating a direct feedback channel between customers/users or other internal teams (sales/support/customer success/marketing) with the product team. We have plans to do more there, but for now these are the options that you can use to do that with the product today:

1. Set up a Jira Service Management queue to receive feedback from customers and internal teams (and how to set up automation rules to do it)

2. Set up a dedicated Slack channel #product-feedback to receive feedback from internal teams (also works with Teams)

3. Share JPD views with other teams and gather their feedback using fields and votes to receive feedback from internal teams

4. Do Idea intake in Jira Product Discovery, letting stakeholders creating ideas in a specific JPD project

Can I invite my stakeholders to contribute to prioritization if they don't have access to Jira? 

Yes you can: invite them as contributors to the project and give them a view with fields to collect their feedback and votes. Here's a step-by-step demo for how to do that. 

How can we share a roadmap with internal stakeholders and customers?

There are two options to share roadmaps in Jira Product Discovery:

• You can invite internal stakeholders as contributors in the project. They will need a Jira user account, but as long as these accounts are only given access to Jira Product Discovery with the role of "Contributor," they will not need a paid license. Demo: sharing a roadmap with internal stakeholders
• You can publish a view and share it with anyone: internal stakeholders, partners, customers, and end users. This view is accessible in read-only mode and you can use it to share your roadmap inside and outside the company by sharing a link. Learn how to publish your views in this article.

Note that you can "embed" a view in a Confluence page: just copy a link to a JPD view or published view, and paste it in the Confluence page. 

I would like people in my company to comment and vote for ideas in a published view. Is it possible? 

Not yet but it's on the roadmap. 

You can also do it by sharing views with people in your company from within a project today:

• Create the view where people can comment, vote, add insights, in your project
• Make the project access “Open” or “Limited” so any contributor on the site can open it
• Make sure users have an Atlassian account (it’s free) and have been added to the site with the “Contributor” product access role (also free)
• Send them a link to the view - Then they can contribute directly in that view (view, comment, add insights, vote)

You can restrict it further to make sure contributors can only access that one view in the project, using the view restrictions feature, part of the Premium plan.

How can I restrict access on a view in my JPD project?

You can use view restrictions, which is a feature part of the JPD Premium plan. Learn how to set view restrictions here.

How do we tell customers that we released something?

In the JPD team we do a few things:

• We have a public roadmap here (it's a public JPD view). We created it in a separate project to curate things differently. Honestly it's been fine to have 2 places: things don't tend to change very fast there since we communicate boulder-sized things there. 
• Users can leave us feedback in-app ("Give feedback" button). This creates a ticket in a Jira Service Management project, and we add those as insights to ideas in our JPD project - more details about this setup here. When we ship something that many people have reported, we use the bulk-edit feature to add a comment to all these tickets (which sends users an email to let them know). That's pretty handy to close the loop.
• We use Pendo to do in-app announcements - when you see a pop-up in JPD telling you "Announcing feature X" we published it via Pendo. Very handy because we can segment who we show it too, and we can also ask questions in-app. (that's also what we use for the CSAT survey)
• And of course we create posts in this community group. Often the Pendo guides link to one of these posts. On the posts people can comment and add more details as to why what we shipped worked/didn't work for them

How can we organize a large list of ideas? 

If you are on the JPD Premium plan, you can create a custom product hierarchy. 

Learn more about custom product hierarchies. 

Otherwise, as a workaround, instead of a hierarchical view you can make use of the flexible views and fields structure to visualize your ideas based on a number of dimensions. You can create a separate field per dimension that you want to use to categorize ideas, and then use them in different views using grouping and filtering.

Demo: using fields and views to organize a large list of ideas

Can we create different issue types and their relationships? (e.g. parent/child or opportunity/solution)

If you are on the JPD Premium plan, you can create a custom product hierarchy for that purpose. 

Learn more about custom product hierarchies.

Otherwise you can use the flexible fields and views system to do this. Here is an example:

Demo: grouping solutions by opportunities. And here's a recording of how to reproduce this configuration

How can we create a roadmap with different time horizons? 

From a customer:

Our 12 month rolling roadmap is divided into 3 time horizons. First is Planned horizon, this is basically the current quarter divided into months. Second is Targeted this is the next quarter and the third horizon is what we call Directional and is the last 6 months/Half of the year. In JPD we can set target dates in months and quarter but we can't set it as a "Half" to show our Directional horizon. Any solution to that?

Here are 2 options, the second one is our favorite

How can we create a roadmap at 2 levels? (one with a list of themes, one for each theme?)

During this webinar we've demonstrated how the JPD team uses a roadmap at 2 levels: one for the overall team, with broad themes, and one for each squad, with more details about each theme. Here's how to replicate this:

Demo: a roadmap with 2 levels

Here's a follow-up to this video, showing how you can show the list of ideas for each boulder when you open the boulder: 

Demo: Show the list of ideas when opening a boulder.

To this, you can now add the option to create a custom product hierarchy, a feature that we introduced in the JPD Premium plan.

How can I manage discovery tasks? 

With the idea hierarchy feature, part of the Jira Product Discovery premium plan, you can now easily manage discovery tasks (for product managers, designers, engineering leaders, etc.) right within discovery project. 

Here's a demo.

Learn more about how to use custom product hierarchies to replicate this. 

Can I do capacity planning in Jira Product Discovery? 

While there are no native features for capacity planning in JPD, we've seen teams use the flexibility of the tool (custom fields and views) to do lightweight capacity planning - based on things like T-shirt sizes. 

Here's a demo.

Can I rank have a view where I manage a different rank for ideas? 

E.g. to run different prioritization scenarios.  

By default the rank of ideas is shared between all views. If an idea is #3 in a view with no filters or sort, it will also rank #3 in another view with no filters or sort.

But you can create views where you manage the ranks separately from that "master" rank. Here's a demo

How do I know if there are new insights added to ideas? 

There are 2 ways to see this today:

• Add the insights field to a view. Then number of insights will show in blue+bold if there’s a new one you haven’t seen yet

• Create a view for ideas that have new insights for the past X days: create a view, add a filter for “insights”, choose “insights created within the last X days”

Is there some way to get a "roll up" of the impact rating for each insight in an idea?

Yes, and here is a demo

Can we have insights that impact a prioritization score differently (e.g. positively or negatively) ? 

Yes, and here is a demo.

How do I automatically change an idea when its delivery issues are done?

You can use Project Automation to automatically change an idea (e.g., change a field value, transition to a status) when its delivery epics/issues are done. 

Demo: project automation in Jira Product Discovery

How do I sync dates between an epic/initiative in Jira and a date in Jira Product Discovery?

You can autofill date fields on an idea in Jira Product Discovery based on its linked delivery tickets. Here's how

How do I reorder statuses in the status field dropdown?

There is a way to make it work (but it's not discoverable at all). Here's how

how can I bulk edit ideas?

You can do that by selecting ideas in a list view (via the checkbox left of ideas) and changing field values there. 

Demo: bulk change ideas

You can do that in the list view

How do I copy field values between 2 fields? 

If you want to copy values between 2 fields in the same project (for example to move from a select field to a multi-select field) , you can use the "bulk edit" functionality in list views:

Demo: copy field values using bulk-edit.

If you are already using a Project Field in a project and you would like to use a Global Fields instead: you can use the “Copy Values” feature which helps you copy field values for all Ideas in a project from a Project Field to a Global Field.

More info and demo for Copy Values here. And the documentation.

How can I group by a date field?

It's not supported yet; however, here's a workaround that helps you group ideas by month (you can thank @Harry Grant for that!)

How do I include effort in a priority score?

You can use a formula that takes into account things like impact and effort to calculate a priority score. Here's an example of how to configure your project to use the RICE formula (Reach * Impact * Confidence / Effort)

Demo: using RICE to prioritize ideas

How do I create a one-pager for every idea?

You have 2 options:

• Create the one-pager in Jira Product Discovery, using an idea description template
• Or, create the one-pager in Confluence and create a "hyperlink field" to link it to the idea in Jira Product Discovery. Note: This is a great way to link pages in Confluence to ideas for things like specs, one-pagers, designs, etc.

Here is a demo of how to use Confluence and Jira Product Discovery

What should we do when an idea is "finished"?

Here's a good discussion about this

What is the difference between a project rank and a view rank? How ranking is different from sorting? 

Learn about these differences and their use cases in this loom video

How do I automatically add watchers to ideas from People fields?

You can do this using Project Automation and they will receive notifications whenever the idea changes. Details in this post. 

Thank you for this solution @Aaron Mosny 👏

Can I bulk import ideas in a Jira Product Discovery project?

Yes, using a CSV import. See this article for details.

Can I bulk import field options into a select/multi-select field?

Yes, you can. Here's how. 

Can I migrate from one site to another? 

The current Cloud-to-cloud migration tooling does not yet support team-managed projects, including product discovery projects. 

You will first need to re-create your projects and their configuration for fields and views in the target site, then export your ideas as .csv from the source site and import them in the destination site :
Open Settings > System > External System Import. Select .csv and your .csv file.

This will not import insights, view configurations, field decorations, workflows and users, which will need to be re-created manually.

Does Jira Product Discovery have an API?

There are a few things we need to iron out so you can query all information via an API, however, there's already a great deal you can do today:

• Jira Product Discovery ideas are Jira issues, so you can query them using the Jira Cloud Platform REST API
  • This will return all fields except dynamic fields (e.g. formula fields).
  • But things like status, multi-select/select, number, date fields, etc. will just work
• We have a public API for insights
• We don't yet support a public API for views

That should be more than enough to allow you to create reports showing the number of ideas, who's working on them, what status they're in, how long they've been in the project, when they were last updated, etc. 

[GuillaumeVDH]

Hi Tanguy,

Thank you for this FAQ with plenty of useful informations. And thanks for your team for developing what will be a very good tool for a better product management in JIRA software environment.

Maybe the only question missing here could be "how to join the beta ?" ;)

I've already opted-in and can't wait to try Product Discovery after I've seen it during a training, but until now I was not able to get access to it. Are you planning to allow more users on it anytime soon ?

Thanks,

Guillaume

[Tanguy Crusson]

Hi @GuillaumeVDH here's a link to sign-up to use the product: https://www.atlassian.com/try/cloud/signup?bundle=jira-product-discovery

[Martin]

Hello to the team, thank you very much for this FAQ! Very interesting to have live examples of how we can use your product and frameworks like RICE. :) 

[Tremis Skeete]

Thank you for this posting!

[James Cody]

Hi Tanguy, I signed up using the link provided but now I struggled to find how to access Jira Product Discovery. I found it in my view of https://start.atlassian.com/. 

Must I always return to that page, or is it accessible via a menu somewhere?

[Nick Dring]

It sounds interesting but at the moment we wouldn't really get much use out of it. We run an internal facing JSM, with a bunch of projects with a small group of agents. Our customers are our work colleagues.

If JPD was available to those colleagues (customers) I'd definitely look at using it but until then its use would be very limited.

[Tanguy Crusson]

@James Cody you need to create a Jira Product Discovery project:

Projects > Create project

Product management > Product discovery

[valentinxxxx]

How to remove this from my PC

[James Doyle]

Hi @Tanguy Crusson 

I have recently enabled the product discovery BETA version so I can make use of and have a play around with the functionality. 

Are you able to advise if there will be any cost for this Jira tool when it comes out of BETA? 

Regards, James. 

[David Nadri]

@Tanguy Crusson - regarding the FAQ: 'Does Jira Product Discovery have an API?':

Could you please clarify if there is a public REST API for creating ideas?

For example, we'd like add the ability to capture user feedback/feature requests (e.g. via a form) inside of our mobile app and add them as ideas in our Jira Product Discovery project (including basic fields such as description, subject/category, date). 

[Tanguy Crusson]

@David Nadri yep there is an API to create an idea, it's just the Jira Cloud REST API for creating issues - which lets you specify the issue type (idea) and set field values. You can add insights to ideas using the Jira Product Discovery specific API.

[Gabriel Henrique]

Hi, this is an awesome tool, but share with customer is a must have feature! We need something to get their feedback and show our plans

[Aaron Mosny]

@Tanguy Crussonwithin the product discovery project, we can see what Jira tickets are linked as deliverables. Is the reverse of this true? On normal Jira projects, is there a way to show the linked idea on the epic or on the story?

[Tanguy Crusson]

Hi @Aaron Mosny yes, but it's subtle today (we plan to improve that): you see the idea in the list of linked issues in the Jira Software ticket.

[Sylvain MERLIN]

Hi @Tanguy Crusson

Thanks for sharing so much ! This helps a lot understading the Product and how we could benefit using it with a practical approach.

[Danno]

I certainly hope you are making the browser extension available to those of us that use Firefox.

[Lomax]

`You can add insights to ideas using the Jira Product Discovery specific API.`

@Tanguy CrussonCan you point me to an example of how to add insights to ideas? Thank you!

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Lomax here you go https://github.com/Atlassian-integrations/polaris-forge-ref-app/tree/master/push-example

[Peter Heidorn]

This is great but I don't have the share option for the external view as demonstrated in the video.

[Gloria Cantareo]

@Tanguy Crusson  -  I am newbie in the community and fumbling every step of the way, I am having so much doing it!! These questions touched my inner nerd - SO THANK YOU!!! 

[Daniel Marcovici]

@Tanguy Crusson I am giving a try to the project, and lots of interesting functionality. 

I've been using AHA! for our product management, but I think in the future with a bit more functionality I could replace it with the product discovery project.

One thing I could not do, is how can I do a "fit view" for the timeline view? If I want to see more long term, there is no way to fit the view:

So, when I try to see a long-term plan of the discovery it becomes hard since I can't see it in a single page view. Is this to be improved in the future? Thanks!

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Daniel Marcovici I'd love to hear more about your use case, I can't wrap my head around how or why you'd plan 3 years ahead on a timeline 🤯 I reached out for a chat

[David Nadri]

@Tanguy Crusson - when using the Chrome extension, how can we attach an image/file from the system library to an idea/insight via the Chrome extension?

For example, instead of clicking the camera icon to capture the entire screen, if I want to screenshot part of the screen, mark it up, then attach it to the insight OR copy/paste an image to an idea/insight via the Chrome extension, how can I do so? 

[Tanguy Crusson]

@David Nadri Not today. what you can do: 

• Take a screenshot
• right click on an image in the page, you should see a "Add to idea" in the list of available actions in Chrome
• but you cannot annotate. However you can open the idea in Jira Product Discovery and edit the insight to add an image you've annotated using a screen capture tool

[Sharon Halpin]

@Tanguy Crusson   Having recently found JPD, I'm working my way through your collection of JPD FAQs and videos. 
This is an excellent resource -  Thank you!