Product update: templates, idea history and more + what we're focusing on in our discovery

[#1]

Hi everyone 👋

Here's a quick update (well, 6 minutes, kinda quick) about what we've shipped lately and the problem areas we're currently focusing on for our discovery (the discovery for the discovery product 🤯)

In particular we've just shipped 2 things for everyone, by popular request:

1. Idea description templates: so you can standardize how ideas/problems/opportunities are defined in your project
2. Idea history: so you can see who changed what in an idea

We've also made a bunch of improvements to the list view and idea view.

Feedback/comments/questions? You know what to do 👇

Cheers,

Tanguy

[Jeremy West]

Pleased to finally hear work is commencing on some form of public roadmap view to be shared with external stakeholders, customers etc. but it is absolutely beyond me why Atlassian continue to try to overcomplicate things. The need for the external party to create/register for an Atlassian account to view a public roadmap is ridiculous.

Ive said numerous times, you need to look at your competitors, the fact that they ALL offer public view and voting without the requirement for an account should give you a fair indication of what potential users of this product will also be looking for.

Forcing Atlassian accounts also prevents the ability to embed the roadmap in websites, document sites etc. 

STOP trying to overcomplicate something many have done before you quite well, keep it simple, deliver the features people are asking for and remove the barriers to entry.

[Jonathan Hau]

I'm thrilled by this update and the announcement around being able to see "History" view. This has been an essential part of our PM's experience of Jira overall, so adding that view as a tab is exactly what we needed.

Regarding viewing JPD views with an Atlassian license is going to be a bit of a challenge for my company. We have hundreds of sales team members, all of whom do not have at Atlassian license. So, I'm worried a bit that this will be an added burden (both cost and access problem) for our employees who need / want to view this information but won't be able to.

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Jonathan Hau Just to clarify this would not require a license, just an Atlassian account - which you can create for free on https://id.atlassian.com/signup

Basically you create a free user account, then you can view what the PM shared, comment, vote, things like that. That's what we're trying to spike at the moment (trying to validate how that can work with the Jira API)

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Jeremy West I hear your frustration, this part of your comment is precisely why we're going down that path:

> keep it simple

When we do discovery we look at Marty Cagan's list of questions:

• Is it valuable?
• Is is usable?
• Is it feasible?
• Is it viable?

And in this case full anonymous access fails at the feasibility combined with viability (it would be very costly since the Jira API platform doesn't support that, and so would turn this into a pretty big project). We believe that the part requiring an account is a big step forward for sharing with people inside the org, and support some (not all) use cases for external collaboration.

Note that we did ship such a feature in the past as an experiment (full anonymous access, using a hack) because people were asking for it. In the end it got very little traction so we turned it off.

[quan]

My team is excited about the history tab on ideas.  Defniitely makes it a lot easier to audit the changes.  Thanks for adding that!

[Jeremy West]

@Tanguy Crusson I think there are two aspects to solving this problem.

The first is a method to share a static view of the roadmap with no ability to interact - this can be shared with people we don't yet want to interact with our roadmap, embedded on websites etc. there is value, particularly with prospective clients of showing them the roadmap but its unlikely you would want them interacting before they are engaged with your product. Creating a clean, filtered view that shows them value would be ideal.

The second aspect is qualified stakeholders having the ability to interact with, comment and vote on issues in the roadmap and this is more in line with your point to which I agree, there is value in having these users known to us during this process, in-fact receiving this data anonymously would not be ideal.

I reiterate that you guys are not the first to do this, for the most part you have executed it well and I really like the tool, but others before you have solved the same problems and made a functional product with these features. These are organisations that this tool will be competing with, you could offer 10 times more value in other areas but if people rely on these features from competitors you are done before you even start the race!