Ranking Ideas in JPD vs Roadmap Report View

[Jeremy Drexler]

Use Case:

5 separate teams, each using their own discovery projects. Within each of these projects, PMs manually drag and drop ideas up and down their lists according to rank/priority.

We use Roadmap Reporting views to bring each teams ideas together in one place. Using global fields, we're able to paint a very detailed picture of what's going on in each project, with one exception - Roadmap Reporting does not respect the idea rank thats been defined in the individual projects. 

An obvious workaround would be to create a "rank" field and manually fill it out, however my credibility in terms of getting new discovery features/workflows adapted is somewhat built on the promise of making things easier/less manual, and this would be a step back. It also doesnt appear theres a way to automate having a hidden rank field update when a feature is drag/dropped.

In the absence of a better work around, I'd like to ask whether this is a common challenge and/or something being investigated by the JPD team. The power of the data that we're sharing is diminished when the top priority items are scattered across a teams list of commitments, and manually updating a rank fields adds more risk of human error + more work for someone (probably me)

[Hermance NDounga · Accepted solution]

Hi Jeremy, 

You're correct today the roadmap view doesn't reflect the rank in each individual projects if you don't use any common sorting field. The workaround would inded be to sort your ideas based on a field in each project, and use this same field in a roadmap. 

The common usage we see among our customers is that they are using a RICE score or a sort priority "score" or a roadmap field like Now/Next/Later, so the "rank" is not usually an additional data they need to manually type. 

Regarding ranking in Roadmaps, since there are two types of ranking (project rank vs view rank) + the possibility to sort ideas, if project A is based on view rank, project B is based on project rank and project C is sorted on a specific field, it was technically difficult to reconciliate these rankings when displaying these 3 project rankings on one roadmap view. 

And you're also correct there is no "hidden ranking field" that would make that easy for us, but that's actually a great suggestion - we wouldn't need it before Roadmaps existed, but it would definitely make sense to implement it now. So I'm adding this feedback to our discovery project. 

And finally I'd just like to let you know that I know today it's not possible, but we are implementing the possibility to drag and drop ideas in the list view for roadmaps. So technically in few weeks, you'll simply be able to reorder ideas directly on the roadmap - no need to use a field. It's indeed additional work but probably a bit easier to do and delegate. 

Cheers,
Hermance
Sr. Product Manager @ Jira Product Discovery

[Jeremy Drexler]

Thanks @Hermance NDounga for the detailed response. Even with this limitation, we are able to finally do our capacity planning all in jira vs using jira and a google sheet.

[Andrei Bacanu]

@Hermance NDounga  instead of looking to reconciliate reordering to actually change a rank value, how about implement a reordering in roadmaps that allows Makers to set items upper/lower in the list even without changing a field?

This would be an improvement! 

[Hermance NDounga]

@Andrei Bacanu we are definitely working on it right now! It came up several times as a major improvement we could do for roadmaps. I mentionned it in my last paragraph

And finally I'd just like to let you know that I know today it's not possible, but we are implementing the possibility to drag and drop ideas in the list view for roadmaps. 

Cheers, 

Hermance