What is the best way to gather feedback from stakeholders to add automatically as idea to JPD?

[Dani Lanovyi]

Hey there,

I was wondering if people found a good way to gather feedback from stakeholders and add it automatically to JPD as an idea. 

Ideally, I'd like to create a form for stakeholders to fill (even those without a Jira account) and when submitted, the new idea should be created in my JPD project with the content of the form. 

Did anyone try to realise something like this? Any tips would be appreciated! 

Thanks! 

Dani 

[Marina Rambo · Accepted solution]

I created a two board intake system.  The submission board is built in Jira Work Management, which has the built in capability of creating a web form.  In that board, each field for that project is very specific - User Type, Description, Context, Product Area, Existing solution, Etc.  

After a user submits a ticket to the submission board, automation then compiles it into a single description, and some discrete fields for categorization when it creates a ticket in our Jira Product Discovery (JPD) board.  It also links the original ticket to the newly created one.  

When a user submits, they can also say that they want to add more information to an existing idea, In that case, there is a field in the submission board for "related idea" they can enter the JPD board key in that field.  Automation will not create a new JPD ticket in this case, it links to the existing, and adds comments to it.  

The automation took more time to set up than the boards, but it saves so much time and effort in the long run. 

[YY Brother]

smart

[Sebastian Pechhold]

In this case, stakeholder must know, that similar or same ideas are already submitted, right?

[Dani Lanovyi]

Thank you, Marina, that's a very clever way of getting stakeholder feedback. Can I ask how much time on average your PMs take to trim the submitted feedback? 

One of my worries is creating another Zendesk that takes so much time to manage, respond to queries, ask for clarification and remove duplicate or irrelevant submissions. 

Thanks! 

[Marina Rambo]

@Sebastian Pechhold  Yes.  There are two ways to do that.  I have boards in the JPD project for each product area - so someone could go to "Invoices Board" and see if there is a similar idea.  There is also a confluence site, for those that are less Jira savvy, that uses the old JQL query macro to list all submitted ideas of that type on a page in confluence.  For example we have an Invoicing page, on that page there is both a list of the open ideas, and a link to the board that has all the invoice ideas.  

Additionally - we have great cooperation with the other departments, who have a standard that you must check to see if it is a duplicate idea in one of these ways, before submitting the idea.   

[Marina Rambo]

@Dani Lanovyi The other thing that the board does is break the ideas into product area, which aligns with our PM's areas of responsibility, so no one has to go through an entire backlog, only the parts relevant to their product areas.  Each PM has a single intake board that has all of their product areas, allowing them to review and update as needed.  

It depends on the week how long it takes, but they go through each week to review.  They can also merge duplicate ideas on the JPD board, when one misses the duplicate check - it stays linked to the original submission on the Submission board.  The real key is the duplicate check done by others, and merging the similar stories. 

I would like to move to a qualitative data repo, like Dovetail, but that has another lift of its own, and right now we rely on the cooperation of the other teams to help us manage duplicates.  

This set of boards is relatively new, and is an evolution from a direct submission into JPD, which had the exact problems Chris outlined. 

You mention Zendesk, we also use the Zendesk Jira Connector App for our customer facing teams, so they can submit a ticket straight from Zendesk into the Submission board.  It is then linked to the Zendesk ticket, and gets updated as the JPD updates.  

[Chris Timms · Accepted solution]

Hello @Dani Lanovyi 

I currently work in this way, and we are struggling big time with it!

1. Users actually interpret adding it to the product project as "accepted, committed work" which could not be further from reality!
2. The inbox is very inconsistent, containing feedback and feature requests in a manner that is hard to quantify and have meaningful discussions around
3. It needs constant pruning, transformed into insights, merged, etc.
4. The list gets MASSIVE, too massive, really to properly manage so your users think their requests just disappear into a black hole

We are planning to move to the model similar to what @Marina Rambo describes below.

1. A JWM board where users can, via a form in our software, give feedback (we get user data and segmentation easily this way)
2. Collate this feedback into Dovetail (A tool the JPD team recommended and use) to sift for actionable problems
3. These problems are what then gets added to JPD and we can have good conversations around what to work on next based on the volume/importance of the feedback we are getting.

All that to say, reconsider using JPD as your inbox for raw feedback, it is much better used as a source of truth for curated feedback!

Regards,

- C

[Dani Lanovyi]

Thanks, Chris, this is really useful and mirrors my concerns as well!