Known limitations of Jira Product Discovery

[Ben Gallant]

Not sure if it helps:

We've been using JSM TM as the "intake form" for our insights, using a form in our customer portal tied to a request type called "Submit an idea."  We collect the details of the insight, engage with our customer on the request they submitted, and gather more details to let them know we're listening.

If the idea is new (there is NOT an existing idea in our JPD board), then we use Elements Copy and Sync with a recipe to "Send new idea to JPD project" - the recipe sends over the Summary and Description. You can choose to sync those fields so the reporter can see any updates to the Summary and Description from JPD back to JSM, and just use the comments to keep track of your thoughts around the idea in JPD to keep them away from the customer.  

If the idea is not new, (there is an existing idea in our JPD board), then we navigate to the ticket in JSM, and use the JPD Chrome Extension to add this ticket to the idea. Be sure to select the text in the description that best captures that person's contribution to the idea! What a cool feature. Don't sleep on the screenshot feature either! Very useful. 

We then move these JSM tickets into a done status called "Captured" (I'm sure there's a better name 😅) which updates the reporter, and makes them feel super good that their ideas are being taken into consideration!  

From JPD, we start thinking about future work, and we use JPD for what it does best: help us know what to do next, and communicate that clearly to all of our teams. 

We then create Epics within the JS board for our software team, and the JWM board for our business tasks.  

We use wallboards and dashboards to communicate to our executive team. 

We are investigating the use of Structure from ALM to gather more detail around capacity and long-term strategy so we can keep track of all of the work that is still to be done.  

Here's a little picture of this workflow for your viewing pleasure.  It's a work in progress and we're always tweaking it.

Any suggestions on how to efficiently track the Epic progress to ALM Structure to clarify capacity, would be much appreciated.  Still digging through that one. 

[Mauricio Heberle]

Please, add the possibility to copy a project and its structure (similar when we create a Software Project with shared configurations). Also, if we could use the fields we create with other projects would be so good.

[Hermance NDounga]

Hello everyone! 

I will address the questions from this past month in this post since we have few updates; 

• GA/Pricing: We've recently posted an update regarding our future pricing model as well as GA announcement. There will be more to come, but we wanted to share already the few bits we had with our community as it had been requested many times. Don't hesitate to leave your feedback on that post. 
• Gathering feedback: As part of our future user model (contributors/collaborators) we are currently exploring the best experience to receive feedback or let users submit their ideas. Still on the post above, you'll see comments explaining their use case, and we are definitely taking them into account to work on this functionality.
  
  
• Integration with Advanced Roadmaps: Currently we see Jira Product Discovery and Advanced roadmaps working hand in hand rather than one replacing the other. From one Jira Product Discovery idea can be created multiple Jira Software artifacts (initiatives/epics/story or any other custom type you have implemented). On Advanced Roadmap you can plan these stories amongst developers and have a granular view of which tickets is blocked by another, for example. On the Jira Product Discovery side, thanks to the delivery progress bar, you can have an overview of this progress, on a board, timeline or list view. We've detailed our vision in this article. 
  
  
• Company-managed projects: Jira Product Discovery projects will remain team-managed projects, at least in a near future, but we will be exploring ways to have shared configuration (fields/templates) even for this type of project. 
  
  
• Customer management: When using an integration (with Salesforce, Jira Service Management, or Zendesk) it is possible to surface the customer (as long as it is a property on the original link) on the insight panel in Jira Product Discovery. However we know the management of Key Customers in the product, via a column, for example, isn't ideal at the moment. Going towards GA, we will focus on the aspects described in this original post, but this one is definitely part of our roadmap. 

Cheers, 

Hermance

[Clemens Grave]

We are just starting to use Jira Discovery across teams. I am very impressed how intuitive and simple it is to use. We have decided to use separate projects for each team as it helps the PM to remain focused and only has to see all their ideas. 

However, I would love to create alignment between the teams to uniformly view at roadmaps. For this a company managed feature would be incredibly useful, so I can define standardized Workflows and template views. 

Overall a great tool thus far though 

[Erin Mihalik]

@Clemens Grave - Does using views within one project not also achieve the desired goal?  That is how we configured it.  The idea is that a PM won't really ever be looking at or working from "All Ideas" view.  They would only be looking at and working within their Views folder and can have multiple views.  They can stack rank per view, filter and use their own custom metrics field per view.  All the while, you can still maintain company level metrics and a company level roadmap view via an unfiltered "All Ideas" page.

[Nicole Chiavacci]

Hello! 

I am getting a ton of value out of the timeline view.

There is the ability to update the "date" inputs on a specific idea to a specific calendar day, but for some reason the timeline can only show views in quarters or months. Is there a plan to add this capability?

Thank you! 

[Mike Gargano]

Is there plans to address this before GA?

Some fields aren't supported in automation rules, in particular:

• Formula fields

This has been a bit of a headache for me, because I can't use weighted scores generated by JPD in any automations. Which means instead of using the formula field to generate the weighted value I then have to use automations to generate that value instead.This renders the formula fields essentially ineffective to me.

[Hartley Pike]

@Hermance NDoungais there a post or discussion about sharing a portal with customers for upvoting and high level roadmap overview?

we are considering a switch from productboard, but this would be critical, or we'd need a separate tool to manage

[v8lust]

How do I revert to the normal JIRA interface? i.e. I want to go back to the plain old Kanban board with the Release button for completed work.

Note: I just do work, I'm not involved with all the fluff, so I don't need or want the fancy charts and graphs that the talkers use.

[Zixuan Wang]

Hi there! We are also exploring to use Discovery as a tracking ticket between and idea was generated till it was approved and can become an initiative/project itself. The size of it can be very big. 

Now if we want to see followed up delivery tickets afterwards, epic is not big enough and we will need to add initiative as delivery tickets, but although it is said "To do this you can create an Epic, Initiative or other issue type from the idea’s delivery tab. This will both create the delivery ticket and link it to the idea." on this page but I cannot link an "Initiative" as a delivery ticket. Will this be possible in the future?

[Erin Mihalik]

@Zixuan Wang I am able to link Initiatives with no problems.  

Are you attempting to Create or to Link existing?

Do you get an error?

[Zixuan Wang]

Hi @Erin Mihalik  Thanks for your reply! I tried to link Initiatives, and in searching area i cannot find tickets. But you are right, when I tried Create new ones it worked. 

[Erin Mihalik]

@Zixuan Wang you should be able to link existing as well. Is the right project selected in the drop-down?  Have you tried pasting the link to the ticket in that field?

Also, I see you only typed the letters portion, what happens when you type the whole issue key?

[Michelle Yip]

Hi @Sarah Green ,
This can be achieved by adding a Custom Field for Target Customer, and you can choose either Free-text fields or dropdown values of a pre-assigned group of users. 

[Robert Barbosa]

I have been trying to create new automation using a JPD field and noticed that some, not all, are available. Is Atlassian exposing some JPD fields for Automation over time?

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Robert Barbosa 

To learn which custom fields are/are not available to automation rules, please try the how-to article linked below.  Essentially you find an example issue (i.e., JPD idea), call the REST API with a browser to view it, and look for your field.  If you find it, the field can at least be accessed by the custom field id, and possibly by its smart value.

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/find-the-smart-value-for-a-field/

Kind regards,
Bill

[Richard Kirk]

Hi @Hermance NDounga 

I'm finding JPD extremely versatile and helpful at the moment. One are where I'm struggling is with the timeline view. I want to use this to replace manual management reporting on major initiatives - I'm using Atlas too but they serve different purposes.

What's good with timeline in JPD:

• the ability to use different date fields and create multiple timeline views
• Setting dates at day/month/quarter - really very useful to accurately communicate the level of certainty around dates

What could improve:

• The option to view the timeline at week level. For an date range of e.g. 5 or 7 weeks, they are both represented as a 2 month card which doesn't look right
• The option to zoom out and show more on-screen without scrolling. It's quite clumsy to show a 2 year view at the month level
• Have these options applicable in the export/share
• Export - Jpeg is not a useful format for drawings, one or more vector formats would be more useful so scaling when placing into other systems/docs works
• Option to include more fields on the cards in the timeline
• Multiple dates. My use case here is simple, I need to visualise how long an initiative has spent in the Discovery phase before it moves into the Delivery stage. If I could choose a milestone date (or even multiple of them) and have that visually represented maybe as different colour shading or labelling, that would solve for my use case.

Thanks

Richard

[Kevin Cocco]

Hi there,

i was wondering if it's possible to restrict a team member access to only one specific view/section/list on product discovery board?

this has certainly been discussed/answered before, I just can't find it.

Thanks a lot

Kevin

[Hermance NDounga]

Hi @Kevin Cocco , 

No it is not possible at the moment. Both your creators or contributors will have _access_ to all views when they have access to a project, you can only restrict what they can do in them. 

What you are looking for is the "Stakeholder role" which hasn't been released yet - see https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Product-Discovery-articles/The-different-types-of-users-Creators-Contributors-and/ba-p/2378354

Best Regards,
Hermance
Product Manager @ Jira Product Discovery

[Irina_Bel_Stiltsoft_]

Ho @Hermance NDounga ,

I wonder if there is any ETA for the support of the marketplace app and API for this type of project. I'll be grateful if you let me know.

[Jenna Stavros]

How can I create sub-features of a feature and have the hierarchy of the sub-features shown in the idea tabs?  I understand I can organize a list with the fields, but I don't have the ability to create sub-features  / products

[Product One] 

• Feature One [tag][tag]
  • sub-feature
  • sub-feature 
• Feature Two
  • sub feature

[Product Two]

• Feature One [tag][tag]
  • sub-feature sub-feature

[Martin Sereinig]

hey there.

we're trying to create ideas through our forge app, but for some reason the forge app doesn't see the Product Discovery projects when trying to createmeta to get the field configuration.

we've tried the following (queryParams contain projectIds and issuetypeIds) and just receive an empty result:

/rest/api/3/issue/createmeta?${queryParams}

/rest/api/2/issue/createmeta?${queryParams}

to debug – we've also tried to just not filter by the projectId, but even then we only see projects that are not Product Discovery. so it seems like those project types are invisible to our createmeta calls.

we've also tried to do this:

/rest/api/2/issue/createmeta/${projectId}/issueTypes/${issuetypeId}

but in this case, the api tells us: "OAuth 2.0 is not enabled for method". we're pretty sure this used to work and we haven't changed the code on our side. is this to be expected? what can we do?

thanks for your help!

martin

[Mike Gargano]

@Hermance NDounga and maybe even @Tanguy Crusson I sent in a support ticket about not being able to manually trigger automations from an Idea ticket in Jira Product Discovery like you can in Jira Software. 

Support pointed me here and said it was a known limitation, though I noticed the verbiage around project automation and its limitations in this document doesn't actually specifically mention anything about being able to manually trigger automations. 

Support had an interesting work around using a check-box to trigger the automation, which would work, but is hardly ideal. 

Is this on the roadmap to support in the future?

I can advocate for my specific use case. I'd like to be able to manually run an automation to make delivery tickets for another team in Jira Software using details from the idea ticket in JPD. This would allow me to quickly capture key details from the idea ticket in JPD and assign a delivery task for another team saving me tons of time from manually creating delivery tickets.

[Hermance NDounga]

Hello @Mike Gargano 

Automations in general is something we are working on, and the manual trigger is something we will explore but has not been prioritized yet. 

Is there a reason why creating a delivery ticket when an idea is moved to "delivery" status (for example) does not work in your use case, and it needs to be a manual trigger? 
With this example, I'm not too sure I understand the benefit because clicking on a checkbox, or clicking on the button "create a delivery ticket" seems to be the same effort. 

Cheers, 

Hermance

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Hermance NDounga 

One advantage of using a manually triggered automation rule for this scenario is that trigger now allows adding user input fields at the time of rule execution, supplementing the information stored in the Idea: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Automation-articles/Request-input-from-users-when-a-Manual-rule-is-triggered/ba-p/2333587

Kind regards,
Bill