How to Collect External Ideas for Jira Product Discovery Using Forms in Confluence

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Gathering great ideas is rarely confined to one tool. While Jira Product Discovery (JPD) is built for prioritizing and managing product ideas, many of the most valuable suggestions originate from customer-facing teams, stakeholders, or partners who don’t have access to Jira — and shouldn’t need it just to share input.

If your organization uses Confluence to document centralize knowledge or public site, there’s a practical way to bridge the gap: embed a form into your Confluence page that automatically creates JPD ideas from submitted responses. No Jira license required. No context lost in translation.

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Why This Matters

Product teams often rely on email, Slack, or other feedback source to gather ideas from sales, support, or customers. This results in:

• Missed insights due to lack of visibility

• Manual effort to reformat and enter data into Jira

• Ideas disconnected from source context or stakeholder priority

Embedding a form in Confluence creates a structured intake channel for new ideas while allowing stakeholders to remain in the tools they already use.

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How It Works

You’ll use Smart Forms for Jira, an app that integrates with your Jira instance (including JPD), to:

1. Build a form that captures the relevant product feedback or ideas

2. Embed that form directly into a Confluence page

3. Automatically create a new Idea issue type in Jira Product Discovery upon submission

4. Route form element data to the correct fields (e.g., summary, description, labels)

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Step-by-Step: Creating an Idea Intake Form in Confluence

Step 1: Design the Form

In Smart Forms, build a form tailored to your team’s product discovery process. Common fields might include:

• Idea title (mapped to summary)

• Problem statement

• Proposed solution

• Product area or team

• Impact level or priority

• Optional file upload

You can include field types like dropdowns, checkboxes, text areas, and more.

Step 2: Create new idea and Map Form Fields to JPD Fields

In the form’s settings, enable “Create new issue” and select your JPD project and “Idea” issue type.

Then map form responses to corresponding Jira fields:

• “Idea title” → Summary

• “Detailed description” → Description

• “Product Area” → Custom field

• “Source” → Label or hidden field

Unmapped fields won’t appear in the idea, but all responses will be saved in the form’s Responses tab for full traceability. And you can analyze that responses with build-in report as well as export to exel or pdf.

 Step 3: Embed the Form in Confluence

Smart Forms provides a link you can place in iFrame Confluence macro that lets you place the form directly into any Confluence page — for example:

• A shared Product Feedback space

• Internal Sales or Support team wiki

• Partner-facing portals or knowledge hubs

Forms can also be shared externally using a secure public link, if needed.

🔍 Step 4 (Optional): Use Hidden Fields and Default Values

To tag ideas by source or submitter group, use:

• Hidden fields (e.g., “Submitted via Confluence”)

• Pre-filled dropdowns to eliminate errors or simplify the form

This helps maintain structured data without increasing form complexity for users.

Example Use Cases

Use Case	Value
Customer feedback intake	Collect feature requests from customers via intuitive portal with form
Support escalations	Capture recurring issues without requiring Jira access
Internal idea sharing	Allow any employee to submit suggestions in a centralized space
Partner product feedback	Provide controlled input from select vendors or clients

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What to Keep in Mind

• This method uses the Smart Forms for Jira app, not native Confluence or JPD capabilities

• Only mapped fields will populate in JPD ideas, but you can include full responses in the Description field if needed

• Submissions are also stored in the form’s Responses tab, so you maintain a full audit trail

• This app works with all Jira projects, JSM, JPD.

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Summary

For organizations managing idea discovery at scale, enabling structured input from non-Jira users is essential. Embedding a form in Confluence allows teams to:

• Capture structured feedback from across the organization

• Automatically route it into Jira Product Discovery

• Maintain clean, mappable data for prioritization

• Reduce the overhead of manual intake or multiple tool switching

If you’re looking to standardize and scale your product discovery intake process, this approach helps you meet contributors where they already work — while keeping the product team focused on what matters: evaluating and shipping the right ideas.