What is Jira Product Discovery?

Product managers are often asked to create a predictable path to success for every product idea. Around 75% of product managers today struggle with determining their product’s actual value for customers, and Atlassian aims to alleviate this issue. 

Many PMs use disconnected tools like spreadsheets, backlog, and email to manage their product ideas, which leads to a lack of centralized location for the discovery phase. To address this problem, Atlassian developed Jira Product Discovery, which allows teams to capture and prioritize ideas, engage with stakeholders, and integrate their product plans with Jira Software. 

Jira Product Discovery provides a platform for converting product concepts into prosperous products. Its central focus is to furnish product managers with a centralized location to methodically gather and systematize product input and make informed decisions based on data. It also offers PMs an opportunity to transparently communicate with and engage stakeholders through customizable views and connect their work with their teams to deliver successful products for their organization. Jira Product Discovery simplifies the process of capturing and distributing the reasoning behind product development. With Jira Product Discovery, you can:

• collaborate with your team to arrange ideas in various views, such as lists, matrices, boards, and timelines
• prioritize ideas and opportunities
• create and share timeline views
• collect customer feedback from several sources like Chrome, Confluence, Google Docs, Slack, and Teams

The importance of Product Discovery in Product Management

Product discovery is crucial to consistently validating what to prioritize and why. In most organizations, this responsibility lies with the product manager, who bridges the gap between technology and business. The role of a product manager involves identifying and implementing technology solutions that align with business objectives. 

While this may seem straightforward, it is a complex task because product management is still a relatively new function that is constantly evolving and being refined. Product managers frequently dedicate significant time shifting between tools to identify new product insights, analyze data, and collaborate with their teams. PMs have an abundance of responsibilities to manage, and it can be all too easy for discovery to become an afterthought. However, it is crucial that we give product discovery the attention it deserves and make it a top priority.

What is Product Manager’s role?

Product Managers have a challenging role that encompasses a diverse range of responsibilities. These include:

• maintaining regular communication with users
• defining a strategic vision for the product
• effectively communicating the rationale behind feature development
• securing buy-in from critical stakeholders on the product roadmap
• validating the impact on existing commitments and making necessary adjustments to plans
• coordinating with the engineering team, and ensuring the team’s motivation and satisfaction

Finally, shipping products can be highly unpredictable, and product managers need to accomplish all of these tasks while navigating numerous tools and modes of communication.

What are the benefits of using Jira Product Discovery?

#1 Data-driven decision making

Jira Product Discovery streamlines the process of strategic planning for product managers by providing a central hub that is tailored to their specific needs. This platform simplifies the process of collecting and organizing product inputs in a structured manner. It empowers product managers with the necessary tools to proactively make informed, data-driven decisions based on this input.

#2 Streamlined communication with stakeholders

Product managers often face a multitude of tasks and may feel reactive or overwhelmed by their workload. Jira Product Discovery helps product managers proactively stay ahead and make decisions with confidence. Additionally, this platform enables product managers to effectively communicate the context behind their decisions to stakeholders in a clear and continuous manner. Tailoring the approach to engagement with various stakeholders can also present challenges for product managers, but with Jira Product Discovery, customizable roadmaps can be utilized to keep all stakeholders informed and on the same page.

#3 Seamless integration with other tools

Jira Product Discovery is a unique discovery solution that seamlessly integrates a product manager’s work with the tools already in use by their team. Product managers frequently experience time loss and duplicative work when shifting context between various tools, but Jira Product Discovery is natively integrated with the Atlassian tools that are crucial for success, and it can also be integrated with numerous third-party applications.

#4 Leveraging user feedback

One of Jira Product Discovery’s most significant advantages is its capacity to integrate user feedback into feature development. This capability facilitates the ongoing enhancement of products while keeping them aligned with customer expectations. By utilizing Jira Product Discovery, it is possible to effectively emphasize customer needs, establish product priorities as a team, and seamlessly transition from product ideation to customer delivery, all within the Jira platform.

What are Jira Product Discovery’s features?

#1 All ideas view

Upon accessing Jira Product Discovery, the All ideas view will first catch your attention. This view serves as a repository for all the ideas added by you and your team, and the ideas are categorized based on various fields. Each idea is aligned with a specific goal in the product roadmap, and the number of insights associated with that idea is also provided. Moreover, Jira Product Discovery allows for the creation of multiple different views to refine the analysis of your ideas.

#2 Impact assessment view

You can use the Impact assessment view to analyze the relative impact of each of your ideas over time as you collect more information about them. You can also increase the projected impact of your ideas. To solicit feedback from other teammates across the organization, you can create a new view for engaging stakeholders on product plans and use the quick share link at the top. You can use the feedback you gather to refine impact assessment further.

#3 Impact versus effort view

This view allows you to compare ideas’ impact vs. effort. The matrix view lets you plot two fields on an x and y axis and compare them against one another. Within this view, modifying the values corresponding to the axes by dragging and dropping individual or grouped ideas is possible.

#4 Roadmap view

This view is organized by now, next and later columns. First, Now represents the ideas we have high certainty in and will start delivering. Second, Next represents the ideas we think will have an impact, but we need to explore more. Finally, Later represents longer-term opportunities for tracking.

#5 Delivery view

Here you can check the usage of the ideas. To connect your product discovery and delivery workflows, it is recommended that you create a correspondent epic in Jira software for every product idea in Jira product discovery. Delivery progress shows you the progress of the delivery of the corresponding epic for each idea. Whenever you are ready to start working with your development team on a particular product idea, simply open up the idea, navigate to the deliver section within the idea and select create an epic and select a project in which you manage your product delivery.

#6 Custom workflows

Jira Product Discovery allows teams to create custom workflows from idea to goal, incorporating diverse prioritization methods, such as the RICE framework for product managers or a built-in voting system on the Jira Product Discovery dashboard. After determining what they want to build, teams can use Jira Software to proceed to the delivery phase.

#7 Voting and rating system

Users can vote for and rate ideas in Jira Product Discovery. The voting and rating system allows teams to assess risks and impacts and view visualizations to understand trade-offs between different features.

#8 Feedback gathering extension

Jira Product Discovery comes with a browser extension for gathering user feedback from various sources. The extension allows teams to collect feedback from users and incorporate it into their product development process.

In summary

Atlassian’s Jira Product Discovery is now available in open beta, and it is a perfect time for your team to try it out. It provides a centralized location for software development teams to capture and prioritize ideas, engage with stakeholders, and integrate their product plans with Jira Software. Jira Product Discovery’s most significant advantage is its capacity to integrate user feedback into feature development, which facilitates the ongoing enhancement of products while keeping them aligned with customer expectations.