How do you handle the interplay of system improvements and new features/ideas in products discovery?

Benedict Lubik March 29, 2023

Hey everyone,

really excited to hear how others are tackling this concept or what your opinion is:

Our product team is currently revisiting how we gather insights, form ideas and shape features - the whole shebang. We started out discussing and mapping the most common and straightforward chain of events in product discovery and JIRA is a great tool to visualize that road:

Collect insights from users, form ideas, discover ideas and shape them into features. Simple enough.

But we are now at a point where we see the needs to combine this process, that is very product management centric and somewhat isolated internally, with our other internal processes for software engineering. 

One thing we are really struggling with in this early stage is our understanding of system improvements, so updates to our architecture or infrastructure, and how they connect to ideas and features.

Contrary to e.g. feature requests from users, these come up in different discussions and almost exclusively internally. The impact that system improvements have on our users is, lets say, less direct than validating and implementing a feature request.

Anyway, my post is already long winded and most likely bizzare. On the off chance that this was somehow understandable, I'd love to know how some of you were able to use JIRA to bridge the gap between Product Discovery and Dev Environment, especially when it comes to system improvements.

Best, Benedict

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Tanguy Crusson
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
March 29, 2023

@Benedict Lubik that's a really great question. We are doing this in the Jira Product Discovery team. I've been meaning to record a Loom that shows how we're doing it but been postponing for the past couple of months in favour of other tasks. I'll aim to share a first version for it tomorrow. It won't be perfect but should show you how we tackled some of your challenges.

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Amanda Barber
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
March 29, 2023

I'm interested to see how the JPD team is doing this and can't wait to see Tanguy's video. 

Our JPD ideas are primarily new features or major improvements and driven by stakeholders. We then have a Kanban board that we use for our larger buckets of work (all epics) - typically, one idea = one or more epics depending on scope. We also have one epic as a holding place for tech debt type work. Each piece of work within tech debt is related to system improvements, etc. and is ticketed as a story. Sometimes, the stories are converted to an epic once discovery/scoping is done. 

The product team manages the JPD ideas (which have a different workflow) somewhat separate from the other Kanban board. The Kanban gives product/engineering a quick view of what's coming down the pike in the near-term and is a great view for the engineering team lead. Each of the epics is typically assigned to one engineer as a "lead" of sorts, so it also gives some context into what each dev is working on. 

Hoping this makes sense!

Amanda

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Tanguy Crusson
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
March 29, 2023

Well, gotta start somewhere, I took 30min to record something to explain how we work and use the product. Here you go: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Product-Discovery-articles/How-does-the-Jira-Product-Discovery-team-work/ba-p/2314917#M1147

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Benedict Lubik March 30, 2023

Very interesting and a great watch, thanks for taking the time! Your process of organizing ideas into roadmap states, buckets and phases was interesting in general. Great naming with the phases!

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