Atlympic Event: 🦊 Product feedback prioritization and management with Foxly & Automation for Jira

[#1]

👋I’m Nikki, co-founder and product manager at Jexo. Jexo is an Atlassian Marketplace partner that builds apps that help you prioritize, plan and manage your work in Jira. 

This article is a true and honest story 🔥 about why we decided to build Foxly (backlog prioritization app) and how we use it internally.

I couldn't decide which of the challenges for the Atlympics I want to take on. Should I write about some of my favorite apps or inventing a whole new one? But then I thought, why not both? 🤔

There are a few apps that we use in our Jira and Confluence like Refined to make our Confluence documentation easier to read, Swanly for marketing campaigns and release management, Checklist for the daily tasks of jotting down small steps that need completing on each task so they don't get forgotten about, and last but not least Foxly for our product feedback and backlog prioritization.

We also use automation for Jira but I wouldn’t really consider it a marketplace app anymore. After being bought by Atlassian, the software became available on all Jira instances; it seems to be part of the Jira suite itself.

If you could create an app today assuming you have unlimited resources what would it be? What would it help you do?

Anyways back to the question of a dream app, I would build (and spoiler alert, we already started 🚀)... 

Working as a product manager made me realize how hard it is to prioritize customer feedback. It's my job to listen closely to what customers want. But with so many different ideas coming in, how do I know which ones are most important?

When you're working on building an app for the first time there can be all sorts of customer feedback that comes your way from day one; and every idea counts! As soon as you start getting more users though, things pick up speed. Then suddenly you can't work on all ideas at once. You need to find the right way to prioritize what ideas are most impactful and what you should start working on next.

We’ve found that it isn't worth trying to manage our priorities outside of Jira. There are few tools available for this, but if you're like us and your entire development workflow is done in Jira already then there's not much point in using another tool outside the Atlassian ecosystem!

My ideal app would help me prioritize my product backlog and customer ideas directly in Jira where our work happens. I would also like to have a way to notify our customers back when we deliver some of their suggestions. 📣

How did you find the app?

Well, there wasn’t any app on the Atlassian Marketplace that would allow us to do what we wanted. So we simply build it! Although we didn’t have unlimited resources (oh, how great that would be 🤩), we still managed to launch the first version of Foxly to the marketplace just in 3 months!

Before building Foxly, we were managing customer feedback in Airtable. The app helped us group ideas and prioritize them based on how many times someone asked for an idea or feature like it, the degree to which they fit into our vision of what a product should be like, as well as the difficulty with delivering that specific item. But this process had some limitations especially when it comes to linking your ideas in Airtable to Service desk and Jira tickets.

What did you use it for?

We use Foxly to prioritize customer feedback with help of simple Automation rule. Here is our high-level process:

1. We have a Jira project called “Product feedback”. In this project, there are two issue types - Suggestions and Improvements.
2. The production support team raises Suggestions in the Product feedback backlog. They note down the exact feedback customer gave us and they link the ticket (source of feedback). Linking the source is important because once we deliver the improvement we can notify our customers back.
3. Then Product manager comes in (on a weekly or bi-weekly basis) and links suggestions to the Improvement tickets.
4. We have an automation rule set that stores the number of linked suggestions in the custom field for each Improvement ticket. And we can then use it for prioritization.
5. Then in Foxly we use an adjusted RICE prioritization framework where we assess key metrics like Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort. We also added a number of linked tickets that we get from the previous step as "Votes" so they contribute to the final score.
6. To assess these key metrics with the team we play Priority planning poker. That way everyone contributes to the prioritization process with their opinion.
7. Once Improvements are prioritized we order issues in Foxly by priority score from highest to lowest and we can see most important on the top.
8. Then we can plan what we’ll be working on this and next quarter. to do this we use a Kanban view in Jira where we have the following columns: Features To Do, Q2, Q1 (and so on to represent quarters), In progress, Notify customers, Done.
9. The workflow is then quite simple. We know what features are planned for this quarter. When we start working on the improvement we move it to “In progress”. And once we deliver it to production we move it to the “Notify customers” column.
10. When there is a ticket in the ”Notify customers” column the Production support team goes through all linked Suggestions and messages our customers back that we delivered the feature they asked for. And once customers are notified they move all Suggestion tickets and Improvement itself to “Done”.

I also made a short video explaining how the Automation is set up together with workflow in Jira so that if you are interested, then have a look 🎥.

Which team used it?

The Product team and Support team use Foxly for customer feedback management. We also have other teams like Marketing, who prioritize what content they should write or QA, who triages and prioritizes bugs.

What would happen if you didn’t have it?

It's a bummer to think about having to go back and using spreadsheets or Airtable. It would be much more difficult for some teams who didn’t have an established prioritization process in place, which means they might not always work on the most important tasks at hand because there are no clear guidelines of what is considered priority number one. This could result in less impactful work overall. And none of us want that 🙃.

[Biro]

Go Foxly go!! Great article Nikki 

[Valter Júnior]

Awesome Nikki!!! Thanks for sharing with the community!

[sheerish_uware]

Thanks for sharing Nikki, I like the new Priority planning poker feature!

[vlad.puhach]

Very useful article! I use Foxly as part of my backlog prioritization process.

[Priscila Calisto]

Wonderful Nikki! That's a great article! Thanks for sharing it with the community! 

[Brenno Faneco]

Great article Nikki! Keep up the good work

[Marvin Meyer-Kahlen]

Great article! Many thanks for the insights

[Björn Döhler]

Thanks for sharing the different possibilities 

[Tobi Theobald _resolution_]

Foxly is really easy to use, even for people with little PM experience like me 😅 It's a very helpful piece of software and gets the job done.

[Michael Schmidt]

Great work! And a good addition to Swanly... 

[Christopher Schommer]

Great post! So many possibilities!

[Felipe Ribeiro]

Amazing article Niki, it was a great experience to help build this game!

[Jenn Velázquez]

Great article Nikki, thanks for sharing the process it's going to be very useful! 

[JOAO LUCAS DOS SANTOS]

Wow, that great! Congrats!

[Willian Krause _Jexo_]

Awesome post, thanks for sharing 🍕!

[Sarah Saleh]

Awesome article Nikki! Foxly 🚀