Looking for advice when running multiple JPD Projects

[Brad Jones]

Hi Everybody :) 

I work for a large Product organization with 5+ Product teams managing individual product areas (not separate products, just separate areas of a singular product).  Each team has their own JPD Project, Idea backlog, intake & roadmap.

I'm trying to setup a Customer Advisory Board Idea intake process, where I can capture Ideas and maintain a CAB focused list across ALL Product areas.  Prioritize those "CAB" Ideas and then hand them off to the appropriate Product Area JPD Projects for Refinement & Delivery.

I know I can "Move" Ideas from my CAB project to the dedicated Product Area project, I can also use affected by and duplicate ideas etc... However none of those options would allow me to maintain the connection to Delivery Items within the original CAB board.

Anybody else managing something similar?

[Andrian _]

If it's a single product, it sounds like there should just be a single JPD project because changes/development in each product area is driven by the new requirements for the product itself.

I know this sounds like someone trying to tell you how to do your job, but sometimes it helps to put things into perspective: Is there a reason why each product area require it's own JPD project?

[Brad Jones]

All good appreciate the nudge and different POV.   I'm not fully against it but with 100+ PM's i'm unsure if i'm ready to force them all into a single way of working and unsure if JPD is really setup to scale to that level with views etc.

Not against it and will keep it in mind.  100% agree it would make things easier in some ways.

[Matt Griffin]

I have a similar setup with my product that has three principal areas that are essentially managed by three different PMs. I have one JPD project for my product and created a new field for each of the three "idea areas." This helps to keep things separate if I need that in views (I have separate now/next/later roadmaps for each of the three) or be able to combine all ideas together easily.

[Brad Jones]

Thanks matt - I'm definitely utilizing the Product Area which does essentially the same thing... 

My main problem there is that JPD has a singular "Create" view which would change dramatically by product area.  

[Rob Mkrtchian]

Your CAB project is another JPD board or you use other tool?

Also, can you please clarify what you meant by “I can also use affected by and duplicate ideas etc…”? 

[Brad Jones]

The idea would be to host a CAB workshop out of which I can get key Ideas.. then the following month (in another Cab workshop) we could view and maintain that single backlog... without showing the FULL product backlog.

so yes the idea was to use a single JPG project almost as an external view.

[Florian Nagel]

We're using one single project for 9 products using a custom attribute "product" and filters to distinguish between those in different views which is working pretty well. We have one "idea inbox" where all new ideas are coming in and from there we decide if we take it into the roadmap or not.

[Brad Jones]

Hey Florian - appreciate the reply.

Agree a single JPD Project might work better... will need to see if we can make this happen internally.. 

How many PM's do you have ?  Does the View list on the left get cluttered/confusing?

[Florian Nagel]

@Brad Jones Each product does have an own PM except one of them who manages two products.

The view list on the left is indeed a bit long but we make use of sections to group them.

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Brad Jones for this specific set up (multiple projects, one project to report on them all) you're probably going to need what we're currently working on: the ability to create views with ideas from multiple projects.

That being said, you might be able to pull it off with Automation. 

• One project for CAB
• One project per team
• Create a field in the CAB project for "Team" (or something like that).
• Set up an automation rule: When you set the value of this field it creates an idea in the team's project and creates a link between them. You can copy over the description, etc.
• Then you probably want to set up automation rules so that any time there's a change to the list of delivery tickets you reflect that back in the CAB idea. 

It would be a bit of work to set up but it think it can work. 

[Doug Rhoten]

Is there a forecast of when the multi-project view capability might be available?

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Doug Rhoten we don't communicate dates for features, but the team's actively working on it and should start recruiting early adopters soon.

[Brad Jones]

Thanks @Tanguy Crusson appreciate the direction.  I'll have a look into automations.... looks like this could work.

i'll keep a lookout for a call for charter customers for your aggregated views.

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks for that suggestion, @Tanguy Crusson 

As JPD appears to be built upon team-managed internals, one tricky part is the JPD-project-specific fields, and copying and field values (other than things like Summary and Description) with automation rules.  That may require use of advanced edit with JSON to correctly select fields and values when copying.

This is an existing challenge due to the design choices for team-managed projects, so no big change with the introduction of JPD :^)

Kind regards,
Bill

[Tanguy Crusson]

@bill we are currently rolling out "global fields" - so you can have some fields defined for the site that you can reuse across projects - which should make things like that easier (and also make it so moving ideas between projects becomes better)

[Andy Lutz]

I'm in a really similar situation as we have a large Product team with ~20 different JPD projects. Right now there's two limiting factors in terms of bringing in feedback/CAB insights:

1. There isn't a great way to have a "cross-project" view, to report out across PM teams.
2. JPD insights themselves can only be tied to one JPD idea (rather than living as an independent entity that can be tied to multiple JPD ideas).

For #1 @Tanguy Crusson and team hopefully will be fixing that soon as mentioned in his reply :)

For #2, I haven't found a good solution, because ideally I'd like feedback/insights to live independently of JPD ideas, so multiple teams can tap into them. The solutions I'm considering are:

• Setting up a separate "Feedback/CAB" project, similar to what you describe. Feedback/CAB insights would be added as JPD ideas, which then can be linked to JPD ideas in other projects.
• Looking at a 3rd party tool that can house feedback/research/insights, which hopefully has some integration with JPD.

I think there's a slight difference in how we may be approaching things, since currently I view Feedback/CAB insights less as specific feature requests, but rather supporting evidence for why we should pursue a given feature. Thus why I want those insights to live separately from specific feature ideas, since the insights could support multiple features.

Wanted to just add my perspective here, since I'm also looking to solve this challenge and curious how others are approaching this process.

[Rob Mkrtchian]

Just curious. Have you considered creating a form and separate queue in service management project (JSM) and add after analyzing feedback in JSM queue add relevant feedback to JPD's separate view or even directly add as insight to an idea. I think JPD team even has a video explaining that.

[Brad Jones]

Hey Andy - nice to see i'm not alone :)

To be clear i'm only using JPD for ideas; a CAB may result in direct problem statements that I would refine in a JPD IDEA or if it's something like "60% of cab members in the enterprise space are offshoring to ABC" as an insight I might capture that in a 3rd party tool like Dovetail or even confluence.

[Andy Lutz]

@Rob Mkrtchian I haven't looked into that specifically, going to add it to the options I'm considering. Thanks for the tip!

[Tanguy Crusson]

Yep we do what @Rob Mkrtchian suggested in the Jira Product Discovery team. We use:

• Jira Service Management for inbound feedback (when you send us feedback in-app)
• Dovetail for user interviews
• Slack for questions from customer facing teams
• This site (community.atlassian.com) for discussions

Here's a link to a specific section of a recent webinar we did that explains how we do it: https://youtu.be/Yp0q7YVYM4c?feature=shared&t=1159