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Product management and operations tools - Jira Product Discovery review

 

JPD is a new player in the market of product management software. Jira (and the whole Atlassian suite) has been one of the most popular tool stacks for teams to deliver software products. Now they're adding a missing piece - product discovery.

I've started this review series by pointing out that Jira is not a tool for product management. However, it's only fair to admit a lot of PMs out there had to use it like one because they didn't have an alternative. Also, it makes perfect sense for Atlassian to add a tool for product management and therefore capture even more of the SDLC process. And maybe their decision to build Jira product discovery is the recognition and confirmation that PMs do need their own tool.


Product vision, strategy and goals

When it comes to creating and communicating product vision and strategy Jira product discovery has pretty limited options. There are no dedicated sections for those important artefacts and so PMs will need to get creative in order to propagate their vision.


However, with goals, the situation is much better. There is a dedicated field for goals that you can configure as you like. Later, you can select one or several goals for your product ideas or delivery stories. The limitation though is that all goals are on the same level so supporting a system like OKRs will take some configuration effort.


Product discovery

You'd expect a lot from a product that has "product discovery" in its title and JPD doesn't disappoint. The main part of the app is the "Ideas" hub. In essence, it's a backlog that you can filter and display various useful information. JPD offers really flexible and powerful views when it comes to displaying ideas, any field could be displayed in the backlog and you can also group items by almost any field. This allows you to create discovery backlogs for different products, teams, goals, statuses...and so on.


You can add insights to every idea, which could come from anywhere. JPD offers a handy browser plugin that you can use to capture any text anywhere and add it as an insight to your ideas. You can also use various document platforms to import data from them.


For every idea, you can add a goal it supports, as well as key customers (or segments) it affects. You can also add linked items to an idea to display dependencies or create a hierarchy (for example opportunity solution tree).


Prioritisation

Ideas in JPD could be prioritised in different ways. By default, the tool promotes impact vs effort (a variation of value/effort). You have two very helpful views for prioritisation: the "Impact assessment" and "Impact vs effort" graph. In the first one, you can easily estimate the potential impact your ideas might have on reaching the defined goals. The impact score function takes into account this estimation and the number of insights (evidence) you have to show the impact score. You can also extend this view with any fields you might find useful to prioritise your work, as well as come up with your own custom prioritisation formulas.


The "Impact vs effort" graph visualizes your backlog and makes it easier to take decisions. As on any view - lots of powerful filters are available to you to present the needed data. Every view could be saved and shared with your colleagues.


Planning

JDP offers some powerful ways you can plan your work. By default, you have a Kanban view that you can adjust according to your needs. With a bit of a setup, you'll be able to plan your work for a time period, for particular teams, for reaching defined objectives or in other ways suitable for your business.


The only thing which I found lacking in the default setup is insight into the capacity of your delivery teams. I guess you can add it by creating a custom field, but some folks might find it quite challenging to do.


Product delivery

Unsurprisingly, product delivery is where JPD excels due to being a part of Jira. Discovered product ideas could be easily turned into delivery stories for your engineers to work on. The progress of development could be tracked effortlessly and you can use the same powerful workflow creator as in Jira.


As a bonus, your engineers will have access to the original discovery ideas so they can better understand the motivation behind the features and explore the collected evidence.


Roadmap

Roadmaps come in all shapes and sizes when using JPD. From the start, you're having a simple "Now/Next/Someday" column-style roadmap, but with a bit of clicking you might produce almost any roadmap type you need.


The level of detail you show on the roadmap could vary as well. You can select any fields to show on the roadmap and group items by various dimensions.


When it comes to sharing the roadmap - JPD needs to improve. Currently, you can export to a sheet or a document. You can also share the roadmap with your team who are using Jira. However, the option to make the roadmap public is missing even though you might partially achieve this by using Jira Cloud documents.


Integrations

When talking about integrations in JPD we need to take into account potential and the current state. Jira as a product has thousands of integrations, add-ons and complementary products. However, JPD is not supporting most of those at the moment. This will definitely change in the future and I am sure the team at Atlassian is working on it as I type this. So if you can wait - JPD will most likely deliver big in the integration domain, but if you need robust integrations right now - you might need to consider other tools.


A specific note about JPD in terms of integrations: not sure if this will be the case but it is likely to be problematic for JPD to have good integration with rival product delivery software such as Azure DevOps or the like.


Special sauce

The unique value of JPD is that it's natively integrated with Jira and other Atlassian products. You don't need to worry about syncing the data and various issues associated with doing this.


Your product discovery process is organically combined with the delivery so you can potentially run your entire product company on one tool. At the moment we also don't know what price Atlassian is going to put on JPD but I guess for their corporate clients there will be good deals if you go for multiple tools or the whole suite.


Conclusion

Jira Product Discovery is a solid first attempt by Atlassian to get into the product management software game. It offers just enough features at the moment to support small to medium discovery efforts and it will likely get better fast.


To be really useful for large and corporate customers it still needs to get improved, especially in the team management and user rights domains. I'd also love to see more in terms of creating and communicating vision and strategy for a product. Some features to more actively include users/customers in the product discovery will also be appreciated.


So if you run your product delivery in Jira and don't have any tool for product discovery - give JPD a try. It's currently free and could already add much value to your product team.


Pros

  • Part of Jira and will be integrated soon with the rest of the Atlassian suite
  • Powerful views allow you to present the data almost in any way you want
  • Unrivalled product delivery tracking
  • Huge potential for getting better by benefiting from the existing Jira add-ons
  • Currently free

Cons

  • Focus on building (ideas first, no sections for vision or strategy)
  • No customer feedback portal or similar capability
  • Requires experienced product ops to adjust for the needs of a particular organisation
  • Not too friendly to stakeholders not familiar with Jira

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