Idea Workflow

[Oleksii Zavrazhnyi]

I was unable to find much documentation about the ideas workflow. Statuses are not aligned, and I wasn't sure how to use them.

Is there any recommended workflow? Share your vision of the ideas workflow.

I'd like to see the workflow explained in the app, so that will guide me in my work.

ChatGPT explanation:

To align the various idea statuses in your product discovery workflow, it's crucial to first understand what each status represents and how they fit into the overall process. Here's a suggested order and description of each stage:

1. Parking Lot: Ideas that are not yet prioritized or fully understood. These can be suggestions from team members, customers, or other stakeholders. They are collected and stored for future consideration.

2. Discovery: Ideas that have been prioritized and are currently being explored by the team. This stage involves research, customer interviews, and validation of the problem or opportunity to ensure the idea is worth pursuing.

3. Impact: Ideas that have been validated in the Discovery phase and are now being assessed for their potential impact on the business. This stage is where you estimate the value, feasibility, and priority of the idea in relation to your product roadmap and goals.

4. Ready for Delivery: Ideas that have been prioritized, validated, and assessed for impact are now ready for implementation. This stage is the transition point between discovery and delivery, where the team prepares to move forward with development.

5. Delivery: Ideas in this stage are actively being developed and integrated into the product. This phase includes design, development, testing, and deployment of the solution.

6. Done: The final stage in the workflow, where ideas have been successfully implemented and launched. This is the point where you can measure the success and effectiveness of the solution, gather feedback, and make any necessary adjustments.

To align these statuses in your workflow, consider using a visual tool such as a Kanban board or a project management software that allows you to track the progress of each idea. This will help you maintain clarity and visibility into the process, ensuring that each idea moves through the appropriate stages in a timely manner.

[Tanguy Crusson]

wow, nice work ChatGPT! Almost there.

The default workflow is: 

1. Parking Lot: Ideas that are not yet prioritized or fully understood. These can be suggestions from team members, customers, or other stakeholders. They are collected and stored for future consideration.

2. Discovery: Ideas that have been prioritized and are currently being explored by the team. This stage involves research, customer interviews, and validation of the problem or opportunity to ensure the idea is worth pursuing. It includes development work, typically in the form of a technical spike, to validate feasibility.

3. Ready for Delivery: Ideas that have been prioritized, validated, and assessed for impact are now ready to be invested in further - these are the team's commitments. This stage is the transition point between discovery and delivery, where the team prepares to move forward with development.

4. Delivery: Ideas in this stage are actively being developed and integrated into the product. This phase includes design, development, testing, and deployment of the solution.

5. Impact: Ideas in this stage have been delivered, and the team is now monitoring their impact: did they really deliver on their promise?

You can use the default template, but we recommend you discuss how you prioritize with your team to define the fields and views in the project. 

For example we don't use this workflow in the Jira Product Discovery team. In fact we don't use the "status" field at all. 

Instead we use 2 fields:

• "buckets" to define the type of investments (we invest 1/3 of the team's capacity in each):
  • boulders (typically new features),
  • improvements (iterations on existing features),
  • reliability (keep the system up and running, address tech debt)
• "roadmap": now/next/someday

[Jan-Hendrik Spieth]

@Tanguy Crussonwe've talked about this, before, but I still haven't fully grasped what it means when you say "we don't use status, at all".

Does it even mean you are working without a workflow?

[Jenya Stoeva]

Hi @Oleksii Zavrazhnyi ,

I can share a diagram how we have done it but the most important thing is to think what makes sense in your context and for your organisation. What workflow would fit best with your needs and way of work.

As soon as you are clear on that it should be easy and you can always adapt the workflow later, if needed :)

You can see in the diagram attached we start with New and then take a decision for every submitted idea if it has merit or not. All the red arrows indicate automation. Once an idea is accepted we do the prioritisation and when the time for it to be implemented comes we attach a delivery ticket(s) to it which progresses the idea ticket status for all the stakeholders to see on the roadmap.