Handling Large amounts of ideas

[David]

Our teams currently has hundreds of enhancement requests tickets in our jira software project. I am exploring Jira Product Discovery as a means to review, prioritize and weed out all of these enhancements. Trying to put hundreds of ideas in seems like it would be very difficult to manage.

I'm curious if anyone has a suggestion on how best to utilize product discovery with this number of ideas while also keeping it manageable. 

Thanks

[Minesh Patel]

I would group each enhancement request into "problem" Categories and then link the individual requests to the "problem" Idea.

One of the concepts of the Product Discovery Board is to review problems you want to solve, decide which ones make the most sense for your company/product, and then progress that solution to that problem to the team that solves it.

This allows you to focus on OUTCOMES and VALUE that you have extracted from your work and the product that delivers it.

I hope this helps. I know it directly does not answer your question, but it's a different perspective of managing the product in question.

[Chris Timms]

Just to piggyback on what @Minesh Patel said I expect to do a lot of pruning, merging and managing of the raw 'idea' tickets stakeholders submit to tie them to some overall goal or thing we want to build, which is whey the bulk management features are so handy!

[David]

@Chris Timms Can you tell me more about the "bulk management features" you mentioned? I'm not familiar with this.

Thanks

[Chris Timms]

The check boxes to the side of issues can be used to move, merge, create an epic connected to or archive ideas on the fly (note the action options at the top of the screen shot)

These make it relatively straight forward to clear and merge the all the similar requests your users are probably going to make.

[David]

I'm getting more familiar with the options. I want to try to reduce our current list of enhancement request first before adding them into the product discovery project. Even if there are a lot, do you recommend still adding each as an idea, but map them to goals? 

I wasn't clear on whether it's a good idea to try to create every enhancement as an idea or not.

[Chris Timms]

The Atlassian Product Managers will tell you that you should limit JPD to ideas you are actually just going to work on, and maintain an 'all feedback' list elsewhere (in a JSM project, for example so you can communicate with stakeholders, presumably).

Personally I am testing JPD by adding all enhancements there and refining the list as I think JPD has some tools that make that process of refining easier (the bulk edit tools above). You are going to have to refine a list of ideas eventually, you just need to test and see which approach works best for you.

[Tanguy Crusson]

> The Atlassian Product Managers will tell you that you should limit JPD to ideas you are actually just going to work on

I beg to differ :) But I'm not sure if we're disagreeing or just saying the same things with different words. The idea behind the app is that:

• You build up the long list of "some day, maybe" ideas&opportunities, and continue adding data to them as you go (e.g. via insights). It's not a backlog: it's not a list you will ever get to the bottom of. But it keeps a tab of all opportunities you can keep adding data to (vs having to rediscover them every time with no prior context). In this bucket of ideas you do a lot of merge/tagging/split down in smaller things, etc.
• You narrow it down to a "medium list" of ideas that are candidates based on XYZ reasons (strategic reasons, user feedback, etc.). For that you use things like: number of insights, formulas, tagging, discussions, visualize on a board to discuss options, visualize on a matrix view, etc.
• You take this list to the test by seeking input from users (e.g. interviews), internal stakeholders (e.g. voting, tagging customers, visualizing on a board/matrix) to create a short list of the things you are going to work on. And these are the ones you connect to work in Jira Software.

You should definitely add all your ideas to the project. And add the feedback these came from as insights. What we advise against is adding every individual piece of feedback (aka "the raw data") to the project because that quickly becomes unmanageable. So basically: you'll end up with a lot of ideas with just one insight, and a few ideas will have a lot more insights and discussions.

[Tanguy Crusson]

By the way, little known feature: you can select multiple ideas using the checkbox, and change a field value in the list --> it applies the same change to all ideas that were selected. We plan to make that more easily discoverable!

[David]

@Tanguy Crusson - Is there any way to bulk import ideas? We have a lot of issues in our software project that shouldn't be there. They should be ideas in the product discovery project. 

Is there anyway to get these out of the software project and into the discovery project without recreating them manually one at a time?

Thanks

[Tanguy Crusson]

@David You could move them from the Software project to the Discovery project.

In Jira:

• Filters > Advanced issue search
• Search for the issues you'd like to move
• top right of the screen: "... >Bulk change issues"
• And follow the prompts to move them to another project, map the field values if need be, etc.

[David]

Awesome, I didn't think about the bulk move option. This will really help!

[Erin Mihalik]

To add to the above. If you have stakeholders submitting tons of ideas, I would still have that happen in a JSM or JS project. You should be able to make first pass at something there and then only move the ones you wish to delve further into to JPD.

Remember even if it's a good idea that you aren't gonna take action on in the next year, then it can be closed ☺️

[Tanguy Crusson]

@David those are really good answers above! here are a few demos from the FAQ that might help you set this up: 

To @Minesh Patel 's point above on grouping ideas by problem - others use "opportunity/solutions" (based on Teresa Torres' opportunity/solution tree):

Can we create different issue types and their relationships? (e.g. parent/child or opportunity/solution)

Not yet, but it's on the roadmap. In the meantime you can use the flexible fields and views system to do this. Here is an example:

Demo: grouping solutions by opportunities. And here's a recording for how to reproduce this configuration

On dealing with a large list of ideas - typically you want ways to visualize them based on different facets:

There's no hierarchical view of ideas. How can we organize a large list of ideas? 

Instead of a hierarchical view you can make use of the flexible views and fields structure to visualize your ideas based on a number of dimensions. You can create a separate field per dimension that you want to use to categorize ideas, and then use them in different views using grouping and filtering.

Demo: using fields and views to organize a large list of ideas

And to @Erin Mihalik 's point on using JSM as a first triage, I see that @Chris Timms already gave a great answer here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Product-Discovery/Interaction-with-Jira-Service-Management-and-Jira-Software/td-p/2058029

In general it's a good idea to split "raw suggestions" from the ideas you're pursuing in your discovery project: don't let it become a dumping ground for everything anyone can think about - it's the list of curated ideas you want to continue exploring or keep a tab on

How can we use Jira Product Discovery to collect feedback from customers/users and other teams (support, sales, customer success, marketing)?

In this first version of Jira Product Discovery, we’ve focused on some the jobs that help a PM do their job: prioritizing ideas and opportunities, creating and sharing roadmaps that stay up to date, and capturing feedback from a bunch of different places (interview notes in Confluence/Google Docs, conversations in Slack/Teams). But for now we assume the PMs have existing channels they use to receive feedback, and we help them send this feedback to ideas in Jira Product Discovery.

We have only partially tackled the job of creating a direct feedback channel between customers/users or other internal teams (sales/support/customer success/marketing) with the product team. We have plans to do more there, but for now these are the options that you can use to do that with the product today:

1. Set up a Jira Service Management queue to receive feedback from customers and internal teams

2. Set up a dedicated Slack channel #product-feedback to receive feedback from internal teams (also works with Teams)

3. Share views with other teams and gather their feedback using fields and votes to receive feedback from internal teams