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

[#1]

Edit on 5 December 2024: 

This post is now outdated. We recommend you do the following instead: 

• Read the roadmapping section of the Atlassian Product Discovery handbook
• Watch this demo for how it all fits together

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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?

[Kyren Cabellon]

Thank you for explaining this. The picture alone explained to me the connection of these.

[Abby Kiesling]

Thank you for this overview.  One question though:  I use JPD as a way to collect, research, validate, organize, prioritize, and do discovery on new ideas.  I typically include the design process and stakeholder conversations within discovery as well.  This way, when an idea has all the information required in order for my engineers to start working, I transition it to a custom status in JPD named "Selected for Dev".  That triggers an automation to create the necessary tickets in Jira Software under my development project.  

With this process, I don't know how I can build an advanced roadmap that will showcase what is [in consideration/coming soon] and what is in the [engineering backlog/actively being developed].  Those two broad categories are represented in their own project -- JPD and Software, respectively... Advanced roadmaps doesn't seem to be able to use JPD as a board for issue intake, so I'm left with building a filter that will envelop both projects.  The problem is, that filter has to be so complex to make sure I am only pulling in MY product tickets from JPD and MY development squad's projects from Software, and I have to rely on labels, which often get removed on accident or not added by mistake.  It's so haphazard to not be useful at all.  

I tried working around this issue by keeping the entire end-to-end view in JPD.  I've done this making Selected for Dev an in progress state and setting up automations to push the idea ticket through the rest of the workflow depending on the delivery status in Jira Software.  This still has it's own issues though because JPD doesn't offer a hierarchy of issue types.  So this forces me to use a field for grouping story tickets instead of just having an epic-level issue type.  

Any suggestions on how I can actually use advanced roadmaps or better ideas for building roadmaps in JPD?

[Rohan Swami]

@Abby Kiesling we appreciate your challenges here and trying to work out the best solution for connecting JPD, Software and Advanced Roadmaps. We'll be sure to reach out as we make some more progress to get your input.

For now, one option could be to trigger your automation from JPD to Advanced Roadmaps earlier, such as when items are still in Discovery. This would allow your Advanced Roadmap to show work that's actively being developed alongside work still in Discovery, with the challenge of you needing to estimate some dates for those items in Discovery.

[David Nadri]

@Tanguy Crusson @Rohan Swami 

Is there a step-by-step guide on how to take an idea from the discovery phase through the delivery phase using JPD & Jira (i.e. "The Journey of an Idea from Discovery to Delivery")?

There is some scattered content already on the pieces of this journey (e.g. Manage the delivery tab), but I think it would be super super helpful for the community to see a real-life example story/use-case/case study of the below diagram end-to-end to understand how JPD fits in the product development process and how it all comes together. Using a real feature/idea as an example would be helpful in making this practical. 

Even better, a guide on how product teams can use Atlassian's products (Atlas, JPD, Jira Software) to view and manage the end-to-end product development process: product mission → product vision → product strategy → strategic initiatives → OKRs → epics → stories. One view that shows how all of these roll up is very powerful. 

[Abby Kiesling]

@Rohan Swami Do you mean instead of triggering the automation at selected for development, trigger it at gathering interest or discovery (two of our earlier in progress statuses)?  I suppose that could work, if we build out the automations to close any Software tickets that are determined as won't dos.  

An issue that that will create is having tickets live in software for long periods of time with no action.  Things in gathering interest and discovery are not always going to be done, and are likely not to be done for some time.  I fear that will create a lot of noise in software that isn't really necessary.  

Honestly this could be solved so easily by enabling hierarchy in JPD....

[Rohan Swami]

@Abby Kiesling yep that's what I was proposing and agree on that downside, you would need to groom them periodically in Jira Software but I suspect that could align with your existing grooming rituals.

[David Nadri]

JPD users: How are you using Jira Product Discovery (JPD) and Jira Software (Advanced Roadmaps) together in real life?

Mainly trying to understand a real-life, step-by-step journey (of the below diagram) from a new idea in JPD to a ticket (Initiative/Epic) in Jira Software.

Any practical insight into your product discovery and delivery workflows using these tools would be greatly appreciated!

[Ryan Charlick]

One of the issues I'm having is that it's difficult to show some of the details for many items on our roadmap in a broad way on JPD. Something like a simplified 'Advanced Roadmap' view that's a hybrid of list and timeline may go a long way in JPD. We like the look and functionality of a spreadsheet with a timeline to go over our roadmap with stakeholders, but we don't need that on a delivery (epic/task) level. We need it on JPD. 

[John Magro]

Very excited to leverage JPD in order to insert an extra layer of efficiency into our end-to-end delivery workflow! 

Im hoping there is a future world in which we can carry over other important fields (Score) so, we can add a layer of priority into the engr backlog for work that hasnt already been prioritized/grouped into larger initiatives. 

[David Nadri]

Hey @Abby Kiesling - following up on your comment from Jul 2023, have you been able to achieve this end-to-end view in JPD of ideas? I'm also trying to have one place where you can see JPD Ideas and their nested Epics all in one place, rather than juggling between JPD & Jira Software.

If anyone else has achieved anything close to this, please share how you did it!

[Abby Kiesling]

@David Nadri I just built everything in JPD.  When the idea goes to selected for dev, i still automate it into the Engineering software project, but I extended my JPD workflow and built automations to show where in the engineering process the update is.  

For example: "Integrate X" might be my idea.  Once that goes through to selected for dev, it automatically creates an epic.  I build the stories in the software project in coordination with my eng team.  The epic is marked as a delivery ticket for my JPD idea.  I have automations that will transition my epic from Open to In Prog to QA to Done depending on the statuses of the story tickets.  My JPD idea also transitions through the rest of the JPD workflow by automation. 

Here's a picture of my jpd workflow: 

[Liora Naginsky]

Hi! 

Where we can find the integration guide for connecting Jira Software with Product Discovery? Additionally, I'm curious if, upon installation, information from Jira Software will seamlessly transfer to Product Discovery for users who already have access to Jira.

Thank you!

[David Nadri]

@Liora Naginsky - the Jira Product Discovery integrations overview may be useful to you.

For more on connecting ideas to delivery tickets, visit the delivery section of the guide. Hope this helps.