Product discovery is the work you and your product team do to discover what to build and why it matters. And at the end of the day, you want to move forward with a solution that solves a user’s problem or adds real value to their life or work.
However, this process can quickly get chaotic in the initial stages without the right product discovery tool. For instance, your ideas could be scattered across documents, spreadsheets, notes, emails, slide decks, etc. This makes it harder to stay focused, prioritize, or explain why some ideas are important.
Jira Product Discovery is one of the best tools to bring structure to this chaos. It can help you manage ideas, connect insights, and make smarter decisions.
Because it has many moving parts, we’ve put together this guide to describe how you can use it. We’ll also try to explain how JPD fits in your product discovery process so you can decide if it is the best tool for the job.
So, what exactly is Jira Product discovery?
What is Jira Product Discovery (JPD)?
Jira Product Discovery is a platform where you can collect, discuss, and select the best ideas to work on. It allows your core product team to think through problems, learn from feedback, explore solutions, and plan before you can build.
Here’s what you will be able to do. You can:
- Collect product ideas, insights, or feature requests from anywhere in one place
- Set up feedback channels, research, and gather insights to support each idea
- Score and prioritize ideas based on clear criteria
- Create and share roadmaps and updates with your team and stakeholders
- Connect ideas to delivery work in Jira Software
We can broadly divide this whole process into two main parts to understand how Jira Product Discovery works. That is:
- Product discovery project.
- Links to your delivery work.
What is the Jira Product Discovery Project
The discovery project is a dedicated space in JPD where all the discovery work happens to help you reach your business goals.
It contains all the product ideas, insights, user needs, opportunities, hypotheses, and solutions. Basically, your product team will decide what goes in the project and also discuss “what they should invest in and why.”
With JPD, you can create as many discovery projects as you like using Jira Product Discovery templates. It has different templates for software development, marketing, IT, product management, etc. You can also start with a blank discovery project if you want to.
The Key Elements of a Jira Product Discovery Project
The following are the key elements you’ll work with in a discovery project:
Ideas and descriptions
JPD lets you create and add ideas to your project. Ideas could be opportunities, problems, or potential solutions that you have for a product or project. For each idea, you can write a summary and a detailed explanation.
Insights
Insights allow you to support your idea with data and insights. These insights include customer quotes or feedback, product data, market research, or feedback from customer-facing teams. You can easily connect some of your feedback channels in JPD through third-party integrations.
Other key elements include:
- Custom fields. Fields like goals, impact, effort, and more. These fields help you sort, describe, compare, and prioritize ideas.
- Views. Views allow you to organize and present ideas in a way that works best for you and your stakeholders. Views are highly customizable and can be formatted as a list, matrix, board, or timeline.
Once an idea is ready to move forward, Jira Product Discovery allows you to link it directly to Jira Software issues (like epics). This connects strategy to execution: the second part.
Connect Discovery via Delivery Tickets in Jira
The delivery backlog is where the development work takes place. It contains work breakdowns such as epics, stories, tasks, sub-tasks, and bugs.
How to Use Jira Product Discovery Project and Connect it to Delivery
In this section, we’ll describe how you can use various elements and Jira Product Discovery features to prioritize ideas and share roadmaps.
Create New Product Ideas
Again, a product idea is the main object you’ll work with in Jira Product Discovery.
These ideas could be problems, product opportunities, solutions, or feature requests. Instead of having them scattered across multiple places like documents, spreadsheets, notes, Confluence docs, etc., JPD provides one place for idea management. You can create ideas, move, clone, merge, and archive them.Once you create a discovery project, you can easily add multiple ideas with the blue Create an idea button and write a one-line summary.
Attributes of an idea
Each idea also has the following attributes:
- Description templates to define your hypothesis, problem, solution, and what you learned (solution retrospective).
- Comments to discuss, share opinions, and ask questions.
- Fields, insights, and delivery tickets.
Generally, these attributes help you add more information to support your ideas.
Once you’ve collected all the information you need for an idea, you can move to prioritization.
Prioritize Ideas Based on Value
How do you decide what idea you should work on and when?
One of the best ways to start tackling this is to identify which ideas bring the most value with the least effort (value/impact vs. effort).
Jira Product Discovery allows you to use fields to kickstart prioritization. Essentially, a field is a specific criterion you add to each idea to measure or decide on something. Each criterion is zoomed in and well-defined. They aren’t broad or vague. For example, you can add fields like:
- Goal connects an idea to a larger outcome. Outcome is the value it provides to customers.
- Impact tells you how valuable the idea could be.
- Effort rating tells how hard it might be to build.
- Insights, comments, votes, reactions, the list goes on.
The main goal of these fields is to help you compare, categorize, sort, and prioritize ideas. It looks like this:
What problem does this solve?
When you don’t have this kind of data or insight (that is connected to outcomes), it is easy to chase ideas that sound good but add little value. You end up guessing, reacting, or following opinions. Most of your discussions can devolve into conflicts or unresolved disagreements.
Clear fields tied to outcomes help you make decisions that aren’t only connected to a desired product outcome. The decisions are also based on data, insight, feedback, votes from your stakeholders, etc.
Create and Share Clear, Outcome-based Roadmaps
It is much easier to create a roadmap that your team and stakeholders will rally behind if you know what ideas matter most and in what order.
In JPD, a roadmap is fundamentally a strategic tool where you can outline the vision for your product and the development direction. It is dynamic, and you can utilize it for planning too.
The main purpose of a roadmap is to communicate your priorities by sharing it with all internal and external teams and stakeholders. The aim is to get everyone on the same page (and their acknowledgement too). It also helps everyone understand what comes first, what can wait, and how decisions were made.
What type of roadmap does JPD use?
The Now, Next, Later Roadmap
Jira Product Discovery uses the Now, Next, Later roadmap because fixed timelines often fail to be effective. Rather than forcing deadlines, they went for this format because it enables your product team to focus on real problems, define product initiatives, and link them to your business goals.
- Now. The Now column contains the ideas that you are working on, well, now.
- Next. The Next column is what will happen once everything in the Now column is complete.
- Later. The Later column is everything else you’ve proposed doing, but it won’t happen until sometime in the undefined future.
Generally, there isn’t really a single right way to make a roadmap in JPD. It depends on you. However, you’ll know your roadmap is working if people don’t need to ask you what’s coming up and when.
- Team members independently share fresh insights and ideas through dedicated channels
- Stakeholders stop requesting ad-hoc presentations to get visibility, instead referring to their dedicated roadmap view.
Let’s describe how you can talk about your roadmap with stakeholders.
Align Stakeholders Around Your Roadmap
Usually, Jira Product Discovery provides three user roles. That is:
- Creators. This is your core product team across product, engineering, design, and research.
- Contributors are points of contact within the sales, support, customer success, marketing, and other field teams.
- Stakeholders. They include the rest of your company, i.e., the leadership, and sometimes even users.
Here is a table to help you understand the responsibilities of creators and contributors. These two form part of your circle of trust.
There are two ways to share roadmaps in Jira Product Discovery. You can:
- Invite internal stakeholders as contributors to the project. They will need a Jira account. But they don’t need a paid licence if they only have access in the ‘Contributor’ role.
- Publish a view and share it with anyone, like internal stakeholders, partners, customers, and end users. This view is read-only and can be easily shared inside and outside the company with a single link.
In addition, JPD lets you create multiple roadmaps for different stakeholder groups easily. For example, you could create a roadmap for business leadership. This is because different stakeholder groups may have various questions and concerns.
For instance, a roadmap for leadership could highlight key concerns like:
- Time horizon. That is the estimated time you can make hard commitments
- Expected impact. What are your big bets, and the reasoning behind why they were chosen
Level of investment. How many resources will teams devote to each idea
Connect Product Discovery to Jira Software
The last step after all this is to connect your ideas to the development work happening in Jira Software. To do so, you must have a Jira Software project created on the same site. Then, you can open one of your top ideas, go to the Delivery tab to:
- Add a delivery ticket if you have existing epics and issues.
- If not, go ahead and select Create a delivery ticket to add a new epic or issue from within Jira Product Discovery.
Jira will show you the available projects automatically. You will be able to track the progress of Jira Software epics and issues in JPD using the Delivery progress and Delivery status fields.
Bonus: Jira Product Discovery Integrations
The following are Jira Product Discovery integrations you may find helpful:
- Jira service management as a source of insight. It can help you gather feedback, bugs, and feature requests from internal teams or customers.
- Confluence to link and share detailed documentation, research summaries, notes, and context behind ideas to keep everyone aligned.
- Third-party integrations. For example, you can connect to Slack and Microsoft Teams to get ideas and insights from these apps. We know teams have a number of other tools outside of Atlassian used to gather feedback, whiteboard, monitor product analytics, and more.
Learn How to Set Up the Best Discovery Project with Jira Product Discovery Today
Jira Product Discovery can help you discover ideas that solve real problems for your business and users. To achieve this, JPD provides a platform for your product team to develop ideas and gather insights from various sources and integrations.
Several features are also available to help you prioritize ideas, create outcome-based roadmaps, and share them with business stakeholders before the development work begins.
Our aim in this guide was to highlight some of the best Jira Product Discovery features we loved and explain how it can simplify your discovery process.
So, join the thousands of product teams using Jira Product Discovery by setting your discovery project today!
