📣 Product update: simplified idea creation experience

[#1]

Hi everyone,

As many of you have noticed we took a few shortcuts to ship the ability for contributors (free users) to create ideas. Creators and contributors were getting different experiences, these experiences were not all supporting Jira Product Discovery fields the same way, etc.

We've simplified all this into a single, easy to understand, easy to use experience.

As a creator or contributor, you can now just click here:

And it opens a form:

You can customize this form in Project settings:

There are a few configuration options: 

• You can turn this on or off for contributors on the project. If turned off, only creators will be able to create ideas this way
• You can choose an idea description template, to ask people to provide more when they create ideas
• You can customize the list of fields that appear on the form. In order to do that:
  • First, create a view and add fields to it
  • Finally, select this view in the Features > Create ideas screen
  • Optionally, you can also configure filters in the view to automatically set field values for new ideas created this way

For more details, quick demo: 

Cheers,

Tanguy and the Jira Product Discovery team

[Amanda Barber]

Yay - this is great! 🎉

[Jan-Hendrik Spieth]

Looking good. Maybe I can now convince me stakeholders that not everyone needs to be creator, after all ;-)

[CC]

@Tanguy Crusson  Thanks for the awesome birthday present.  Has it been turned on yet?  As an admin I see all the fields when I click "create".  My creators are not seeing anything yet below is my testers set up.  I have my forms and required fields set see pic below the testers set up.

[Tanguy Crusson]

Hi @CC : not yet , probably tomorrow if all goes well

@Jan-Hendrik Spieth that is the exact opposite of what we'd like to happen, of course 😅 

[Tanguy Crusson]

@CC it's ready!

[Erki Tammik]

Jan-Hendrik Spieth

 Maybe I can now convince me stakeholders that not everyone needs to be creator, after all ;-)

@Tanguy Crusson 
I'm currently in a situation where I'm trying to convince others that not everyone needs to be a creator.

The only thing preventing this is that idea creators cannot modify the fields that were present on the form. It would be ideal to provide functionality where creators can allow this action upon request.

Essentially, what I mean is that once an idea is submitted, the information provided with the form should be locked for editing. This helps maintain control over the roadmap, particularly if the idea has already been prioritized.

Even if we make everyone creators, I haven't come across any permissions in the roles that would restrict editing to only their own ideas. To keep everything organized and tidy, it would be great if not everyone had the ability to edit all ideas.

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Jan-Hendrik Spieth it is going to be unlikely we'll be able to provide that level of granularity in the medium term. Not to bore you with the details but the Jira permission system doesn't support that in the first place, and then we'd need to revisit every view to make sure people can edit some ideas and not others. It would be a pretty big lift. 

Maybe we'll explore other solutions later to improve it, e.g. somehow finding a way to let contributors re-open the idea creation form to edit their submission after the fact. 

[Erki Tammik]

@Tanguy Crusson 
I believe that this issue is not easy to resolve.
When I look at our boards, I can see that ideas may contain numerous different fields, and it is relatively easy for someone to make changes without the project lead noticing it.
Even having the ability to lock specific fields for editing would be really helpful. Might not be the best solution.

I can't recall any other good ideas at the moment, but perhaps someone else shares the same thoughts.

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Erki Tammik the only way I can think of keeping this under control is to limit who is a creator in the project to the people who can be trusted to make changes to ideas there. Or, if there are different teams with different ownership, then organize it so they work in different projects. 

One thing we discussed earlier was the ability to "freeze" specific fields in specific views, I'll add your feedback to this bucket when we revisit this

[David Nadri]

@Tanguy Crusson - thanks for the video walkthrough! 

1. In the JPD project settings > Create ideas tab > there's a toggle that lets you "Make all fields mandatory". Is there a plan to allow Creators to make only a subset of fields on the form be mandatory instead of all or nothing?

2. In your video (from 1:48 on), you mention a couple ways to approach Idea intake and prevent contributors from messing with/"polluting" the list of ideas and roadmap views:

   • a) Create a separate JPD project for idea intake. However, this won't be an option if you're only looking to use one project.
   • b) Use a custom field (e.g. “Triaged?") to keep new ideas in one view and all triaged ideas in a separate view in the same JPD project. The problem with this approach is you have to remember to include the filter for this custom field for each view, including future views that are created (by other creators too) so that an influx of non-triaged ideas don’t pollute the views.
   • Could you please share other options for approaching idea intake from Contributors without the ideas getting added to and cluttering other views without a Creator being able to manage them first? For example, I'm thinking of something similar to option b) such as using a Status field ("Backlog") that new Ideas get assigned with and go to a "Backlog Ideas" view, and then the Creator can move them to "In Review" or some other Status to move them our of the "Backlog Ideas" view. But the issue I mentioned in option b) still remains, so I'm looking for a better, more reliable option.

[Tanguy Crusson]

Hi @David Nadri 

1. it is all or nothing, we're trying to keep things simple for now
2. you are right about the pros and cons of each option. 

Personally I'm not a fan of the solution letting contributors create ideas directly in the project. We use a Jira Service Management queue to receive feedback (when you click on "Give feedback" in a Discovery project, it goes to Jira Service Management, then we use the Chrome extension to add snippets of this feedback as insights to ideas).

From the FAQ: 

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

In this first version of Jira Product Discovery, we’ve focused on some the jobs that help a PM do their job: prioritizing ideas and opportunities, creating and sharing roadmaps that stay up to date, and capturing feedback from a bunch of different places (interview notes in Confluence/Google Docs, conversations in Slack/Teams). But for now we assume the PMs have existing channels they use to receive feedback, and we help them send this feedback to ideas in Jira Product Discovery.

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

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

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

[steve_mullin]

@Tanguy Crusson these examples are very helpful, thank you. I'm setting up my company's project now and my instincts are telling me to use a Status to manage the Triage queue. We are going to be stuck with whatever I choose so interested to hear reasons to consider another setup such as the Triage checkbox. Cheers. 

[Omer Meshar]

Hi @Tanguy Crusson ,

Some of our creators wanted for a long time to be able to use the "Create" button instead of the "Create an idea" button, but as long as we couldn't configure the form, it wasn't really relevant.

Now it is, and that's great! However, there is some confusion since the new idea they can now create through the "Create" button, does not get the default values of the view they are currently working in, and instead gets the default values of the "Contributors" view.

Another issue came up, where the creators would like to have some fields present in the form, that the contributors don't need (and we would rather they won't have).

So the question is - would it be possible to change the form of the idea created by the "Create" button according to the view you are in?

[Tanguy Crusson]

Thanks for the feedback @Omer Meshar - for now there is only one form. We might revisit this later. 

[Andrea McDougall]

Hi! Is it possible to have the idea creation form part of the Chrome Extension? When a contributor creates a new idea using the plug-in, it currently doesn't ask them the required fields from our template. Thank you! :)

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Andrea McDougall the creation form currently only works in app, but thanks for the feedback! we'll look at what it takes to add it to the Chrome extension later.

[Viktor Soullier]

Hi @Tanguy Crusson ,

Is there an option to create multiple forms that are conditioned by one initial field. 

This feature is available in JIRA with different fields if you create an epic, a story... That would be amazing to have the same capabilities in JPD as behind "an idea", there can be a lot of different needs.

Thank you,

Viktor