How are we meant to collect ideas from internal stakeholders?

[Jonathan Bron]

I'm looking for the best way(s) to enable internal stakeholders to submit ideas to a JPD project.

Our customer success and sales teams are constantly getting ideas and requests from customers/prospects, and some of our other team members are former users of our product, so they are always putting forth suggestions for new features and enhancements.

I want to enable them to quickly and easily submit ideas and insights and generally contribute to the product development process.

1. Can we use the Jira Cloud x Slack integration to provide them with a form to fill out, which would result in an idea being created?
2. Should we assign all of the users in our org to be "contributor" users in JPD so they can just navigate to the board and hit the [Create] button?
3. Is there some other quick & easy way to provide them with a form to fill out for idea submissions?
   1. I tried the JSM (which we don't use) automation and it did not work well, nor was it easy to implement or use

[Tanguy Crusson · Accepted solution]

Hi, this is what we have on the FAQ about this: 

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How can we use Jira Product Discovery to collect feedback from customers/users and other teams (support, sales, customer success, marketing)?

Check out this section of the Atlassian Product Discovery handbook

We have only partially tackled the job of creating a direct feedback channel between customers/users or other internal teams (sales/support/customer success/marketing) with the product team. We have plans to do more there, but for now these are the options that you can use to do that with the product today:

1. Set up a Jira Service Management queue to receive feedback from customers and internal teams (and how to set up automation rules to do it)

2. Set up a dedicated Slack channel #product-feedback to receive feedback from internal teams (also works with Teams)

3. Share JPD views with other teams and gather their feedback using fields and votes to receive feedback from internal teams

4. Do Idea intake in Jira Product Discovery, letting stakeholders creating ideas in a specific JPD project

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@Amina Bouabdallah from the JPD PM team is actually looking into how we can improve that, we've received a ton of feedback about this. 

[Jonathan Bron]

Merci @Tanguy Crusson — I like the idea of a feedback channel in Slack a lot, even if it isn't as automated or form-based as I might want it to be.

I'll also explore using JSM a little further, although as I mention in other responses below, it's somewhat cumbersome and overcomplicated for this use case (particularly considering we have no other needs for JSM licenses at our org).

The workflow you outlined in Share JPD views with other teams seems really nice. Does this require additional licenses for JPD? Or does assigning the 'contributor' role preclude the need for more licensing to support this use of JPD? We're a very cost-conscious startup and want to make sure I understand the implications of going down this route.

[Tanguy Crusson]

We use these 3 methods ourselves:

• Slack is for internal teams (sales, support, stakeholders)
• JSM for user feedback (when you leave us feedback in the app it goes to a JSM queue and we have a rotation in the PM team to look at it)
• Sharing views with some internal teams and customers (e.g. the public roadmap)

For sharing views: you can share views with anyone (people in your site, people outside of your site - e.g. customers, anonymous access). It's all free. 

There are limitations though: 

• Contributors can create ideas if you give them access to do so but they're not able to edit them (we treat this like a submission form). They can, however, add comments, insights and votes. 
• Published views are read-only (I think we support comments for contributors). 

[Tanguy Crusson]

By the way if you want to see how we use these internally in the JPD team, you can watch this demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P7HBBQyQ5U

[Gary Spross]

The utilization of a JSM project is the best route. It gives users a form to complete, so it can be made "user friendly". You can also utilize the ticket generated within the JSM project to communicate updates made on the linked Idea ticket back to the person who created the idea (and even any participants they may have included). Technically, most of what you would setup could occur through automation, so you wouldn't need to license many (if even more than 1) to JSM. If you're using the free JSM plan, just note you only get 500 automation runs per month, so that might limit you. Standard gets you 5,000 automation runs per month, so you could pay for just a single user to be licensed to get that benefit.

That said, it would be awesome if Atlassian had a JPD portal on their roadmap. This would allow for a much easier, efficient, more straight forward way of collecting ideas from external users (and even internal ones!).

[Jonathan Bron]

I found the instructions for setting up the automations to be cumbersome and inaccurate, but I can always spend more time there and try again. 

Agreed 100% that a simple portal for unlicensed users would be ideal. It's something most of the competition does already.

[CByrer]

Following = )

[Miriam Hopton]

Following as we will be using JPD for ideas starting next year with our business stakeholders (which includes sales and customer success teams). 

Cant wait to try it! We use Jira projects + confluence to manage feature requests/ideas but looking to streamline using the new JPD. Thanks Atlassian for the cool new tools and always evolving!

[Nick Haller]

Hi @Jonathan Bron ,

If option 3 was not ideal, then option 2 would most likely be the best moving forward.

Actual JPD stakeholders (JPD role) cannot create ideas. They can simply access and review Published views. Only creators and contributors can create ideas at this time.

I also see option 1 as being somewhat problematic because if you were to apply an Idea creation form, this only applies when creating an idea from within JPD. The form does not hold true when creating the idea from within Slack, or outside of the JPD project (like when in another Jira project and selecting the Create button at the top of the UI).

^ Engineering is aware of this limitation and lack of functionality / hoping to improve this in the future, but not real ETA on if/when this will be available.

[Jonathan Bron]

Appreciate the updates and clarifications @Nick Haller . 

Using JSM seemed clunky to me, and since we have other tools for service management, it seemed like a lot to learn and configure for a simple intake form. Nothing stopping me from revisiting it to get it working properly, just over-complicated IMO. 

I mainly mentioned Slack since as a small startup the vast majority of our work happens there organically, and a simple form that would result in the creation of an idea object in JPD seems like it would be the shortest route from A-B for us. 

[Nick Haller]

@Jonathan Bron ,

That all makes sense. We do not want to overcomplicate your entire workflow.

If you need assistance with setting up a JSM portal, feel free to open a ticket with support HERE, or through Give feedback tab >> Get help from the support team option.