How can I assign tasks to team members in the Product Discovery Project?

[Mary Kaczmarek]

Is there a way I can create subtasks for Ideas that I can assign to members of our Discovery team? Or does anyone have ideas how to solve this?

[Ivor]

I think you are confusing JPD to have the same features as Jira software and I don't think the product design was meant to do this.

The JPD preferred way is to have the actions written in the Idea description as a checkbox.

[Mary Kaczmarek]

hi @Ivor , thanks for the comment. Actions could work but  I'm wondering how we can integrate the discovery tool into our discovery track and also use for work management. For example, we have 4 design team members participating in discovery and I would like to assign the various tasks (interviews, research, design) to them and have clarity on what ideas they are working on. 

[Ivor]

@Mary Kaczmarek  another option is to create delivery tickets under the idea. Not the intended way to do it and it wouldn't register as subtasks by as linked issues instead and track the status and its % progress through the delivery tab.

You can create the tickets in any project board on the same site and across Jira service management, jira work management or jira software.

[Abby Kiesling]

+1 Mary... Essentially you need the ability to make different types of ideas.  Epic ideas, and sub or story ideas.  I need this as well... 

[Aaron Ellis]

I too feel it makes more sense to allow subtasks to an idea as it proceed through the discovery process, be it for tech feasibility work, design ideation and iteration, or conceptual testing while validating an idea's worth. 

One problem with doing it as an action is then comments are just a long string instead of related to a specific task, and if your team tracks time to certain phases of discovery, that's much harder without individual tracking of those things. 

I also find tracking it in Work management odd, because we generally have a core team of leads that are collaborating through the process, instead of sending it off to design, or sending it off to dev. We usually work through the ideas together, and it's still a really crucial part of the discovery process. Linking tasks, stories, or tickets to an idea gets really hard to pin down all the pieces, instead of having it all as part of a single core idea. 

Just my 2 cents. 🤷‍♂️

[Julian Geddo]

Hi Mary,

Similar to JIRA, JPD has an assignee field which can be used to assign an idea to a team member. From my knowledge it wasn't designed to handle subtasks in the same way other applications, like JIRA, are able to.

Hope that helps.

[Mary Kaczmarek]

Thanks @Julian Geddo how would you assign work to the design team in this case if you want multiple people to work in parallel on the discovery for an idea?

[Julian Geddo]

@Mary Kaczmarek good question, we are currently having multiple people on the business side work on a task and on the IT side we normally have one person.

To do this we actually have two fields, created as @people fields, that we use to show whos part of that idea "project team". On these fields you can tag multiple people. From there we use on the business side confluence to write the requirements and then JIRA for the stories and sub tasks. If you prefer to use JDP idea templates you can tag people with to-do items on the description as others have mentioned.

You can also use the link issue function on an idea to link multiple ideas to one idea. Then you can go ahead and make an "epic" style idea with many small linked ideas which relate to the large one. Each linked smaller idea can be assigned to an individual.

[Julian Geddo]

Here is an example using linked issues since it seems to be closes to what you were looking for.

[Mary Kaczmarek]

Thanks for the suggestions @Julian Geddo , I think this is a good solution given the current limitations of the PDT.

[Julian Geddo]

Glad to hear this one works for you! As you said there isn't a perfect solution given the current limitations but hopefully this lets you continue to use the product. I think overall product discovery is a great tool, at least for our company, so its worth using this work arounds.

[Rohan Swami]

Hi @Mary Kaczmarek ,

Currently Jira Product Discovery is focused on the Discovery side of the problem, we don't really have task tracking features in their beyond the basic ones previously mentioned by @Abby Kiesling and @Ivor  (Assignee field for an idea, add tasks in the description field).

To track the work of non-software teams I would recommend using Jira Work Management which is built for this purpose: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/work-management You can then link to the Jira Work Management tasks from Jira Product Discovery.

[Abby Kiesling]

Appreciate the suggestion but I don't believe that will be functional for our product team.  What is your definition of discovery if not to take a singular idea and group it with other singular but related ideas under a larger idea or epic? 

For example, we may have an idea to add a "reporting dashboard" to be available to our end users.  We may also have other ideas come in that request "a page views metric" and "a time-spent-on-page metric" and a "unique daily active users metric".  All of these individual metrics would need to be a story under the "reporting dashboard" epic idea.  

[Rohan Swami]

Hi Abby, we might be talking about 2 different things here. One functionality is having related ideas and parent/child ideas - this is on our roadmap. You could probably use this capability alongside the existing Assignee field to do some basic task tracking for ideas.

Building out specific task tracking functionality on the other hand is a different ball game, I can appreciate the demand for this, though it's not on our roadmap for now.

[Mary Kaczmarek]

@Rohan Swami Based on what you're saying, the main purpose of the product discovery tool now is to serve product managers to gather and asses ideas. In our case, part of the assessment and discovery is done by the UX research and design team, so it would be helpful to have the ability to assign and track tasks which are part of standard discovery process.

Since insights and designs are gathered directly within the idea ticket, would it not make sense to assign subtasks within this idea to team members? Otherwise, as you're suggesting, the team would be working on 3 Jira projects at the same time:

• Discovery tool
• Software delivery project (Jira software project)
• Design discovery project  (Jira work management project)

I would be curious to hear how your or other teams set up the workflow between the different tracks efficiently. Thanks!

[Rohan Swami]

@Mary Kaczmarek We're at a very early stage with this product (it's still free to use!) so we may very well tackle these problems in the future. There's a tonne of features we want to bring to customers and it's a tough challenge prioritising between them, as every Product Manager knows!

We don't set guidelines on how our teams do their task management. My team uses Confluence to write details on product strategy, feature requirements, user stories etc. So we also keep track of our discovery tasks in there as well.