The relationship between Jira Product Discovery, Jira Software and Advanced Roadmaps

[#1]

Hi there!  

We often get questions about the relationship between between Jira Product Discovery and Jira Software and Advanced Roadmaps. I'll try to clarify a few things here. 

First, here's a high level view of how we see things:

• Jira Product Discovery is here to help you with Discovery

• Jira Software is the market leader for Delivery

• Discovery and delivery work hand in hand. There are some things that are clearly in the realm of discovery (e.g. assessing potential solutions for opportunities based on insights), others that are clearly in the realm of delivery (e.g. running sprints), and things that are in the overlap between the two (e.g. technical spikes, deciding how to prioritize technical debt vs new features)

In this first version of Jira Product Discovery we have focused on the core discovery jobs, and spent a limited amount of effort looking into the areas of overlap with delivery - which is where you see the “delivery progress” field for example. It’s an area we plan to unpack a lot more as the tool matures.

We are creating Jira Product Discovery so you can collect all the ideas/problems/opportunity/solutions you have, many of them you will never do anything about, and decide which ones you prioritize and why - that’s where you hold these conversations with your teams and stakeholders across the company and with customers and end users. You validate these decisions continuously by talking to end users and capturing all of this, and reassessing continuously what is going to have the biggest impact to the goals you’re after, based on learnings. The outcome of all this is a product roadmap showing high integrity commitments, that you can easily share with everyone.

When it comes to delivering these commitments, you can use to Jira Software. You have corresponding epic(s)/initiative(s) for each idea, you can break them down in smaller chunks, and try to map out how all the things will fit together, focusing on dependencies, team constraints, more detailed planning if the sequencing is tricky, etc. This is what Advanced Roadmap is here to help you with.

It is still early days, Jira Product Discovery is in beta and we see the current experience as “version 1”. There are many opportunities for how Jira Product Discovery and Jira Software can better work together to help you build better products, and we are exploring many concepts for that… Because we know there is so much we can do by having discovery and delivery in the same app! Down the line you can expect the line to become more blurry between these two experiences. In the meantime, here’s a simple way to think about things:

• If you are creating a product roadmap that you want to share with your CPO, CEO, business teams, support, sales, customer success: use Jira Product Discovery, and create views that explain the “why”

• If you are creating a delivery plan that explains how you plan to sequence the work taking into account all constraints, in discussions with the people who care about the details for the “how” (e.g. engineering leadership): use Jira Software and Advanced Roadmaps.

Note: here's a great blog that was a source of inspiration for how to innovate from within Jira when creating Jira Product Discovery - we're still very much in the "iterate" phase.

[Minesh Patel]

If we focus on the best practices for discovery, this tool will be very successful. Thank you for what you do, and I look forward to riding the journey with you.

[Brent Vierling]

Great article.  The thing I'm struggling with right now is where does Atlas fit in with JPD?  I'm trying to figure out if delivery communication should exist in Atlas, JPD (or both). 

I love the concept of Team curated updates but struggle with the thought of creating an Atlas project for every Jira epic/project and the struggle to explain/train stakeholders in Atlas and JPD.

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Brent Vierling thanks, here's how we're thinking about that one (note to self: write another post about that to replace the 14min long Loom 😅)

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Product-Discovery-articles/Product-update-what-s-coming-up-in-Jira-Product-Discovery/ba-p/2153199

[Brent Vierling]

Thanks @Tanguy Crusson this is very helpful.

[Erin Mihalik]

Thanks for this!  Atlassian did a roundtable last year about Story Points.  Someone in the round table made a comment that summarized to "Tools and processes are designed to have a job.  When people assign other jobs to it that it was never intended to do, is when it fails."

I am actually in awe of the number of questions and requests being posted in this message board for what people want JPD to do.  I don't think anyone is wrong for asking the questions but assuming that most of you are in the product field, I would recommend putting yourself in the shoes of the Product designers of JPD.  They are intending for software to stay in its lane and do the thing it does best.  They want it to achieve the job they set out for it to achieve.  If we, the users, constantly request for things that it was not intended to do, that is how we end up with a jack of all trades product that does nothing well.  

[Michael Areola]

This is no doubt a good initiate but it should also connect market exploration continuously through validated learning. Which mean an opportunity for product discovery to be evolving. A bye product of  solution intent as well. 

Thank you

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Erin Mihalik don't worry we have thick skin 😉 We listen to everything and take most request as a learning opportunity. For example it is very clear right now that we need to go the extra mile in the app so it better explains the jobs it's meant to help PMs with, and how to best use the app to solve specific problems - for that we are looking at our onboarding flows again. We listen to everything doesn't mean that we do everything that people ask (especially when it goes deep into delivery) but we adapt how we think about things constantly. 

For example, if you'd asked me a year ago if we would ever ship a timeline view my answer would have been a very strong "no way, we need to help people not shoot themselves in the foot". By talking to many PMs we realized that there are many scenarios where it actually makes sense to use one, in the context of the jobs we set out to solve (e.g. in prioritization discussions, everything looking equal - a card on a board - sometimes doesn't help, so having things representing effort - e.g. a card of a larger or smaller size, and some indication of high-level timing - is helpful). So we shipped this feature.

We also learn a lot from these discussions about how various PMs do product and the different levels of maturity of product teams.

That's why it's called discovery (and we love it 🙂)

[Wendy Overton]

Very true @Erin Mihalik Yet I suspect that the vast number of features being requested is hinting there's a load of opportunity here and lots of unmet needs in the industry.

It's the job of @Tanguy Crusson and the rest of the Atlassian team to distill the signal out of these discussions to decide their product roadmap, but I find the entire discussion fascinating.

[Jimi Wikman]

Awesome post @Tanguy Crusson !

This looks like you have a good plan and I think your positioning of JPD is exactly where I think it should be.

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Brent Vierling update about the Atlas integration: you'll be able to start using it hopefully from next week: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Product-Discovery-articles/Upcoming-product-improvements-Atlas-integration-ready-for-early/ba-p/2195274#M751

[Rohan Swami]

Hi folks,

We’re now conducting more research to understand how customers are using Jira Product Discovery alongside Advanced Roadmaps. If you'd like to share your feedback and shape the improvements that we make to the product please book time in with me through Calendly https://calendly.com/rswami-atlassian/jpd-ar

Cheers,
Rohan

[Yancey Larochelle-Williams]

Has anyone tried to use Advanced Roadmaps with Jira Discovery? As in, created a record in Jira Discovery, added it to Advanced Roadmaps and tracked items in Jira Software that are added as delivery items to the record from Advanced Roadmaps?