Merging ideas is good, but what about nesting, like Epics?

[Karina Caverly]

Hi community - my team is capturing project planning ideas using JPD. We like it! One feature I'm not sure exists or how to enable is the Epic-type view that exists in Jira. 

Situation: Multiple people feeding in ideas to our JPD list, where one idea is emerging as the core function (epic) with multiple other ideas as sub-tasks related to that Epic. 

How to best handle this? It would be awesome to set an idea as an Epic idea and then other ideas as the sub-tasks to support the Epic, with the associated nesting and organization like in Jira. A bluesky would then be to push the Epic from JPD with the subtasks into Jira to track delivery.

Does this exist? Linking ideas exists but visually the nesting and expansion features aren't there with linking. 

[Hermance NDounga · Accepted solution]

Hey Karina, 

Jira Product Discovery is designed to help you prioritize ideas and create product roadmaps, so in essence, within Jira Product Discovery you would only create the Epic level. 

Then in the "Delivery" tab of an idea, that's where you'd create the corresponding epic. In that way, what you see in Jira Product Discovery is always a high-level view of your product roadmap. 

Then in Jira Software, you can split this Epic in multiple stories and subtasks that represent the actual work that need to be done, and that can be represented in a granular way in Jira Software on Advanced roadmaps. 

In Jira Product Discovery, under one idea, you'll be able to see Epics and all the tasks under it, but to keep the high level view, this will only be represented by delivery progress, 

So your stakeholders such as Head of Products can continue having a, high level type of tracking, and open the idea to have a more granular level of information 

and your engineering functions can have a granular representation of epic to subtasks in Advanced roadmaps. 

Cheers

Hermance

[Brittany White]

Hermance - this is very helpful, thank you!  If we have a number of ideas that get submitted and we begin to see an epic formulating amongst those, would you recommend Merging those "ideas" within Product Discovery to only include one or are you indicating that Delivery would just be the one epic that other ideas are tied to.  We've yet to dive into Delivery, so would love to learn more about what you illustrated above.  

[Hermance NDounga]

Hey Brittany, 

I would say that it depends of the level of granularity of these ideas! 

Let's take an example:

Let's say as a PM for Jira Product Discovery, I received these three suggestions and I create them as Ideas:

• Let me link an epic to an idea 
• Let me track the delivery progress of an idea 
• Let me see all tasks associated to an epic in an idea. 

When reviewing my idea list, i would realize that these three suggestion make sense together and an idea should represent a good chunk of customer value. So while these three suggestions make sense, as a PM I want to measure the value provided to the user and just shipping one of these three isn't enough IMO. So I would merge those three together and call the new idea "Create a delivery panel".

Then I would create an associated Epic, and the engineering manager would probably create three stories reflecting the suggestions and surely more, such as "create a new tab", or "create a side panel ", and sub tasks under them, and even create dependencies between these stories - but that's beyond what I need to know as a PM. 

What I will track is the delivery progress bar, and simply know that when I see the bar is green then I've been able to ship value to my customer, kinda regardless the number of stories that were behind it. 

This is just an example, so a bit caricatural but if you're interested in learning moreabout best practices in JPD, i'd suggest listening to this webinar Uplevel your Jira Product Discovery practices 

[Sam Hepworth · Accepted solution]

@Karina Caverly We have the same need. We create features from multiple ideas. We do this by having two types of ideas "Feature" and "Ideas" (actually we have more types, but that is another story). When we link an idea to a feature, the linked idea is automatically labelled with the feature name. We can then show ideas grouped by feature labels.  

A side note is that this enables us to like the same idea to multiple features (and the other way around). In this case the idea gets multiple labels. Sometimes an idea is actually multiple ideas, so it can make sense to have the same idea linked to multiple features.

We use insights as a kind of comments, since they are quite limited in their functionality. If we used insights, we would need to create insights (input) before we create the ideas (based on the input). Anyway, Jira is also grouping ideas by linking them to each other (they call it boulders or something).

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Product-Discovery-articles/How-does-the-Jira-Product-Discovery-team-work/ba-p/2314917 

[Brittany White]

@Sam Hepworth  I love this idea.  How are you able to create two types of ideas and show them the way you are above.  We also get similar ideas and I would love to be able to group and show them as you are above.  Is this all done through labels?   I'm looking for a way to show boulders and rocks within Product Discovery vs. pushing it over to Jira.

[Rob Parrish]

I too like this idea! And wondering how it was done. Does anyone have any clues? @Brittany White did you figure it out?

[Rob Parrish]

Or @Sam Hepworth if you don't mind sharing "how". In my version of Product Discovery it only supports "idea" class.

I'm guessing maybe you created a column called "type" and started to categorize, perhaps? With this approach I'm not able to figure out how to group by the linked ticket.

[Sam Hepworth]

@Brittany White To have different idea types we created a customer field called "Type". The JPD product management team also use a custom field called "Type". We use the following idea types: 

I have seen some posts that JPD will support different idea types out of the box in the future.

[Sam Hepworth]

@Brittany White Yes, we use labels. When an idea is added to a feature, we have automation that addes the name of the feature as a label on the idea. Since labels cannot have spaces, the automation converts spaces to underscores. An advantage of using labels, it is an idea can be linked to multiple features.

[Alevia Thomson]

@Hermance NDounga Hiya - I've seen somewhere that introducing a hierarchy to JPD is on the roadmap. Do you have an indication of when this may be released? Thanks!

[Hermance NDounga]

Hi Alevia, 

For the moment this functionality is just being explored, we don't have a timeframe for when it would be available 

Cheers, 

Hermance