Known limitations of Jira Product Discovery

[#1]

As we collect more and more feedback from you, we wanted to share the current functional limitations (and their eventual workarounds) in Jira Product Discovery:

Sharing configuration (including fields) between projects isn’t supported

Jira Product Discovery projects are currently only available in a team-managed project setting, not company-managed, which means they are self-contained, and cannot share configuration or fields with other Discovery projects. If you want to reuse the configuration of a project in another one, you’ll have to replicate this configuration manually for now, since a specific configuration cannot be templatized or copied from another project. 

Update 27/02: Global fields are coming 

Importing ideas has limitations

You can import ideas into a project using a CSV import, however: 

• Field settings, views and project settings won't be brought over through this method
• You can’t yet import insights alongside ideas this way

We do not recommend using the Backup/Restore method with Jira Product Discovery projects as we are aware of multiple issues affecting the ideas and the project. 

Project Automation is only partially supported

You can use Project Automation in Jira Product Discovery projects, with the following limitations: 

• Some fields aren't supported in automation rules, in particular: 
  • Formula fields
  • Vote fields
  • Insights field
  • Delivery progress/status fields
  • People fields
• Project Automation doesn’t support triggers or actions for an idea’s Insights

Check out our article regarding Automation to learn some best practices

An Idea may look different based on where you open it from in Jira

Jira Product Discovery introduces new field types (delivery progress, vote, formula...) and concepts (insights, comments on views...) to Jira. Fields can also look different to the rest of Jira (colors, emojis, etc.) These new items have been built outside of the Jira legacy platform to bring more flexibility to Jira Product Discovery, but support for these hasn’t been added in all the places where you can open an issue in Jira

• When creating an idea by clicking on the blue Create button in the top navigation bar, the idea’s fields are going to look different. We recommend using the "Create an idea" buttons in Jira Product Discovery instead
• When opening an idea from the advanced issue search (Filters > Advanced issue search > search for the idea and open it) the idea will look like any other Jira issues, and you won’t see formatted fields, insights or the delivery tab.

Notifications

It is currently not possible to receive notifications for mentions in a view's comment or an idea's insight.

Cross-site linking

You can link ideas and create delivery tickets in any project, as long as the project belongs to the same site. Jira Product Discovery currently doesn't support linking ideas to tickets from other sites or Data Center instances. 

Support for Sandboxes 

Jira Product Discovery is available only in free and standard versions. Sandboxes aren't supported in Jira Product Discovery and we recommend to remove Jira Product Discovery from your sandbox as we can't guarantee optimal experience. 

Cloud-to-cloud migration

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

At the moment, you will need to export your projects as .csv 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

Support for Marketplace apps and API

Atlassian Connect, Forge / Marketplace apps aren't working in Jira Product Discovery projects yet, and the API for Jira Product Discovery artecfact isn't public.

Contributors who are also Jira admins cannot access JPD projects and ideas 

Users who are both in the jira-admin and contributor group cannot access JPD projects. This is a known issue, affecting only non-licensed users.

Workarounds include: 

• Assign users to only one group, based on their role's priority.

• Alternatively, since Jira Administration and Contributor roles are non-billable, you can create separate users for each group and switch between them as needed.

[Erin Mihalik]

I think the Team-Managed is a blessing and a curse. Yes, it sucks that the fields need to be duplicated for the fields that people are traditionally sharing. I'm assuming that is things like "Client/Customer" or "Product" or "Team".

The blessing right now though is that a Product Manager can come into the project and create their own field for prioritization metrics without the need for an admin.

For example, maybe the person managing a specific mobile app broke down the company OKRs further and on their filtered list, they want to add a "Mobile App Goals" field to use or maybe they just want to add a goal to it.

It would be awesome if JPD could maintain that all the "unique" prioritization metrics fields could still be created and edited by admins of the JPD project. Then have some sort of way for site admins to choose which fields are "shared" from the company managed "custom fields".  Best of both worlds. 

[Aaron Mosny]

A few questions:

1. Are there plans to allow company managed discovery projects?
2. Is there a roadmap of planned features or changes?

The timing of the beta release has helped our organization so much! We cant wait to put it into practice on all of our teams!

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Hermance NDounga 

Thanks for openly sharing this information!

You seem to describe that Jira Product Discovery (JPD) projects are instances of Team-managed projects (TMP).  When this suggestion to share custom fields between TMP projects is implemented, will that automagically apply for JPD also?  https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-20905

And, there are known reporting issues when trying to consume information from both Company-managed projects (CMP) and TMP ones.  For example, the design choice to have multiple story point fields.  What, if any, limitations are known for JPD when trying to link to and report on issues from different types of source projects, CMP and TMP?

Kind regards,
Bill

[Hermance NDounga]

Hello @Aaron Mosny @Bill Sheboy  👋🏽

To answer your first questions, we don't plan to integrate company-managed projects in the Jira Product Discovery supported templates currently, but we are discussing how users could reuse configurations or fields across projects. We are indeed in contact with the team in charge of the feature request to see how this feature could be beneficial for us/ integrate with Jira Product Discovery projects.

Regarding limitations towards reporting on Jira Product Discovery issues, the same would apply then for regular team-managed projects, but when it comes to reporting in Jira Product Discovery, I would emphasize more on the "unique" field types that we've created for this product such as formula or vote etc... that wouldn't be available in Dashboard Gadgets for example. 

We'll definitely update the community when we will have more clarity around this feature, but we don't have a pre-defined roadmap or release schedule since it can change quickly according to the feedback we receive from users, here or in-product. 

Cheers, 

Hermance

[David Moore]

Hi @Hermance NDounga , I just want to check if its possible to create an Idea via an API yet? You mention above that Connect, Forge Marketplace apps is not currently supported, but the status of the API wasn't mentioned...

If it is not supported, would there be any rough timeline to when that might be possible?

Thanks!

David

[Hermance NDounga]

Hi David, 

We haven't exposed the Jira Product Discovery API publicly yet, however, the regular Jira Cloud API should work with Jira Product Discovery (for the commands that aren't for company-managed projects only). So in your example, you could use the Create issue command to create ideas in a Jira Product Discovery project. 

Cheers, 

Hermance

[Ka Silveira]

Hello guys! I've try to use a Discovery Project for manage ideas in my upstream proccess and generate the child epics but I have a big problem to manage my Jira Plans. We need to fix the hierarchy of ideias in Plans because today it is wrongly as Story Level. When ideas are displayed in the plan, they appear with the same level as standard issues but we need them to have the same level of an initiative (higher than epics).

[Aaron Mosny]

Ka, I believe that this is intentional. Ideas are meant to exist along side or in parallel to any type of work, be it something as large as an initiative or as small as a story.

Forcing the hierarchy would break this concept.

[Ka Silveira]

Aaron... I understand that the idea can be something as big as an initiative or as small as a story but currently Atlasian forced the minimum hierarchy (Story) and this breaks the basic concept of discovery. I don't have the flexibility to configure the hierarchy and have forced minimum granularity. Within the Discovery Project there is a shortcut to quickly create children epics but they cannot be displayed like that in Jira Plans.

[Erin Mihalik]

@Ka Silveira The Ideas in Product Discovery are not part of the hierarchy at all.  You link Initiatives, Uber Epics, Epics, Stories to the Ideas but they do not fall in line with the hierarchy.  The way the "Deliver" section is configured, you are only creating or linking an issue, not nesting them below or above any level.

[Matt Lane]

@Hermance NDounga  @Tanguy Crusson 

Hi Team,

I know configurations of fields etc are currently confined to an individual project, cannot be shared.

But wanted to confirm if this is the case for the new Idea Template feature, and if you will be looking to allow for sharing of Idea templates across multiple JPD projects in future?

Thank you.

[Matt Stobo]

Hi,

We are currently trying to implement Jira Product Discovery for managing a portfolio of work.

One outcome we want to achieve is roles with specific permissions. Those are:

- Create issues and edit only my own issues
- Manage all available issues, including comments, edit other people's issues, but NOT transition issue between statuses or modify views in the LHS menu. 

At present, both of these roles seem to be possible to create via the existing permission set, but both roles are unable to create ideas at all. 

Any advice on workarounds or possible solutions?  If not, is there any current ETA on the JPD specific permissions? 

[Hermance NDounga]

Hi @Matt Lane ! For the moment, there is no cross-project shared configuration, however, this is something on our roadmap. The templates could be part of this feature :) 

Another idea we have would be to enable the creation of custom JPD projects templates, and reuse them to create a new project.

I'll make sure to include your piece of feedback around template as an insight for these ideas 👌🏽

Cheers, 

Hermance

[Hermance NDounga]

Hi @Matt Stobo
When configuring a custom role, you can specify that the user is able to create issues, without giving them the right to transition issues.

However, views are specific to Jira Product Discovery. Because we are reusing Jira Software permission scheme at the moment, unfortunately, it is not possible to assign permissions specifically to views management. This is one of the aspect of Jira Product Discovery we are planning to improve soon :) 

Cheers, 

Hermance

[Ram Iyer]

Hi @Hermance NDounga , 

Further to @Matt Stobo's issue above, here are some more details of the issue we are facing.

1. I log in as a person who has the following permissions: 
    - Create <ProjectName> Issues
    - All permissions on "Collaborate on <ProjectName> Issues"
2. In the "All Ideas" view, I click on "Create an Idea"
3. Enter the "Summary", and hit "Enter"
4. I get an error saying "Something went wrong"
5. The idea shows up after refreshing, but I am unable to edit any of the other fields after that.

So with this permission, all I am able to do is, create an idea with the "Summary" (with the error message appearing) and am unable to enter any additional details. 

[Hermance NDounga]

Hi Ram, 

Indeed, after Matt raised it, our engineers did some more research and were able to identify that it was currently a bug.

When you notice this type of issue (error messages etc) don't hesitate to click the "Give feedback" button (we can see a little bit of it in your screenshot :) ) You'll have a direct line with our support engineers

Cheers, 

Hermance

[Robert Di Falco]

Can you make any of the fields in Idea mandatory? Or can you only add optional fields. Also, it looks like there is no way to remove fields from the Idea form, is that correct?

[Hermance NDounga]

Hello Robert, 

Currently, all fields are optional (except for the summary) primarily because of the inline editing of the list and the board view, which is the preferred way to create ideas in Jira Product Discovery. 

The fields on the idea form are controlled at the level of the instance, so you can decide which fields to see on the form (Show fields > Custom fields) but it will impact the form creation for other projects - as they will also need to select the fields that are relevant to them, instead of relying on the default "all fields". 

We are definitely considering an improvement regarding the idea form to make it more suitable for Jira Product Discovery. 

Cheers, 

Hermance

[Leshia]

A follow-up question for @Hermance NDounga response to @[deleted] question. I created custom fields that I wanted to add to the Idea ticket form but they do not appear under the custom fields option when I make a new ticket as an option to select them.  How do I create a custom field and then add the field to the ticket?  

[hroy]

1. Can we query on the Product Discovery space and build dashboards on it?

2. Is there a way to create tabs for templates that are used in the Product Discovery Ideas?

3. Can we use a Product Discovery Idea to become an Initiative that we can track using Advanced Roadmap?

4. Can we see a Kanban board across Product Discovery Board Ideas and the Initiatives we are working on in Jira software?

[hroy]

When is the GA version of Product Discovery coming through?

[Adam Gardner]

Hi there @Hermance NDounga .  Just stumbled upon JPD from one of our vendors and are using it in its Beta state.  

Few questions:

• The Stakeholder Feedback option, any clues to when that might be heading to beta?  It's such a key part of what we do internally, our organization would love to be early adopters if there is such an option.
• Also, HROY mentioned a go live for a GA version and I was curious as well.  

Thanks for being so responsive to all of the questions!

[hroy]

When does Product Discovery become an Company managed team in Jira?

[Manuel Schneeweiss]

We would need an issue collector. We want to embed that into our website, so stakeholders can report ideas via webform and issues for new ideas get created automatically.

Thanks, Manuel

[Sarah Green]

When I'm creating an insight, I'd like to be able to associate that insight with a specific customer. This can sort of be accomplished based on where the insight was created from, but it would be much more useful to add a customer's information as fields on the insight. 

Is this planned for GA?