When an idea isn’t an epic

[Peter Heidorn]

Sometimes ideas can be big enough that they deserve to be on the roadmap but the technical delivery work is very small. Perhaps just one Jira card.  It’s important that we have visibility of the idea but due to the size of the work it’s not deemed epic worthy. 
Does anyone have any feedback on best practice? 
I can see I can relate ideas to other issue types so that’s an option but it does feel a bit complicated. Should we be considering creating epics anyway? 

[Beau Fruits · Accepted solution]

Two thoughts here: 

1. You can link to a single user story, instead of an epic. 

2. There's no reason you CAN'T use an epic, even if the feature is small/specific.  Sometimes it's handy as you go, because the related stories start coming out of the woodwork, and you end up with 5+ stories or tasks.

[Ben Arundel]

In this instance, I create/ link to a story so we can still keep track of the delivery. I don't think there is a rule that the idea has to link to an epic; you can link it to any issue type. 

[Gary Spross]

Any issue can be manually linked, but it would be nice if the issue type to create for delivery was selectable, as opposed to only have Epic as an option.

[Peter Heidorn]

@Gary Spross I think you can select easily here!

[Gary Spross]

Hmm, I wonder if this is a recent update. I swear last time I created a deliverable issue, it would only create it as an Epic.

In any case, this is great! Thanks for sharing that!

[John Sayers]

Hi Peter,

We advise our teams to log all ideas on Product Discovery, regardless of size. Could be a small piece of work (story), an Epic (multiple stories), a Proof of Concept, a large project, pretty much anything they want. They can add a custom fields to categorise the work (Technical Debt, Small Change, Large Project, Small Project, Feature, Bug Fix, etc.).

The real power is when you assign Effort and Impact, in that you can then use the matrix to decide what you will and won't actually do, and prioritise work for teams. See matrix below which you could of course filter by Team, or Customer, or Category of Work etc.

It's really useful at meetings, and steering groups, to help prioritise. E.g. you will likely do all Top left items, never bottom right. 

Hope that helps.

John.

[Peter Heidorn]

Thanks for feedback @John Sayers 

Appreciate it. 

[Brian Channell]

As Beau mentioned I would just attach a story instead of an epic.