Tracking movie ideas in Jira Product Discovery

[#1]

Hi everyone 👋,

Following up on my Home design with JPD article, I'd like to share another unique, non-business use case for Jira Product Discovery (JPD).

At our company, we often organize casual gatherings and social events at the office, which include activities like pool, board games, pub quizzes, and movie nights. Every few months, we project a movie on the big screen for “FuK - Filmovi u Koiosu” (which translates to "Movies in Koios" in English). Naturally, we bring popcorn and snacks! 🍿

To keep everyone informed about upcoming activities, we use a dedicated Slack channel, where all events are announced, often with additional information or updates.

Bringing Movie Night Ideas into JPD

To make it easy for everyone to contribute movie ideas, we initially started with the organizing team suggesting a few films and gathering feedback from the rest of the team. Then we thought, “Why not use Jira Product Discovery to streamline this?” This approach allows us to gather ideas from everyone and keep track of movies we've already watched. We set up a JPD project and opened it up to the entire organization.

Since almost every film is listed on IMDb, it made sense to use it as our primary source. Everyone can suggest any movie, regardless of whether they’ve seen it, by filling out fields such as:

• Movie name
• IMDb link
• Categories
• IMDb rating

We also added a special rule in the Duration field to flag suggestions longer than 120 minutes, since our informal rule is to project movies that are under two hours.

We created a few different views for movie suggestions, like ideas ordered by creation date, open ideas (both in list and board views), and top-rated ideas based on IMDb rating. All employees can browse and switch views to explore submissions.

Finally, since not everyone is a regular Jira user, we’ve recorded a Loom onboarding video with step-by-step instructions on how to submit a movie idea and navigate the different project views.

The Movie Selection Process

Once we’re ready to plan another movie night, we start by reminding everyone to add their ideas to the JPD project. We send this reminder a few days before the organizing team selects a movie category from which ideas will be shortlisted.

Once the category is chosen, we select three or four films based on factors like duration and IMDb rating. These movies are then put to a vote in the dedicated Slack channel, where the poll remains open until one or two days before movie night. Closing the poll a bit early gives the organizing team time to prepare, as one of us is responsible for getting snacks and drinks based on the number of people who will come and watch the movie.

Looking Back

The JPD workflow we use for movie ideas is straightforward, with three main statuses: Open, Not Selected, and Watched. After each movie night, we update the statuses, marking the movie we watched as Watched and setting the other candidates to Not Selected. ✅

In addition to statuses, we use custom fields to organize movies selected for voting at each event, along with event dates. This setup allows us to look back at previous movie nights, easily seeing which films were shortlisted. Occasionally, we might bring back previously unselected movies for future votes, giving them another chance to make it to the big screen.

What’s Next?

Like any process, there’s always room for improvement. We’re pleased to see our colleagues using JPD, even if it’s just to familiarize themselves with the tool for potential future use cases. One key enhancement we’re considering is shifting the entire voting process from Slack to JPD. 🤔

Additionally, as we organize more movie nights, we want to explore how to better utilize the existing data. A potential idea is to add a timeline view, making it easy to see when each movie night was held, along with new views for both open and closed ideas.

No matter what, we’ll be ready for the next event! I’d love to hear your thoughts—do you have any tips for organizing movie nights or using JPD for similar activities? Feel free to share your ideas in the comments!

[Amanda Barber]

Love this unique way of using JPD! Thanks for sharing!