How to Use Jira Product Discovery to Manage Ideas, Build Roadmaps, and Prioritize What to Build…
How to Use Jira Product Discovery to Manage Ideas, Build Roadmaps, and Prioritize What to Build Next?
Jira Product Discovery is a tool that helps product managers capture, organize, and prioritize ideas, as well as build and communicate roadmaps.
It provides a central place to manage the entire product discovery process, from gathering and evaluating ideas to creating, and sharing roadmaps with stakeholders and finally linking the product initiatives with the delivery tasks.
Why Prioritization is Important in Product Management
Prioritization is one of the most important tasks of a product manager. It involves deciding which features and initiatives to work on, and in what order. This can be a challenging task, as there are often many competing priorities.
Some of the challenges of prioritization include:
Limited resources: Product teams have a limited amount of time and budget, so they need to be careful about how they allocate their resources.
Competing priorities: There are often many different stakeholders with competing priorities for a product. Product managers need to balance the needs of different stakeholders and make decisions that are best for the overall product and business.
Uncertainty: It can be difficult to predict which features and initiatives will be successful. Product managers need to make decisions based on the best available information, even when there is some uncertainty.
Using the RICE Framework for Prioritizing Your Product Roadmap
The RICE framework is a simple but effective way to prioritize your product roadmap. It stands for:
Reach: How many users will be affected by this feature or initiative?
Impact: How much value will this feature or initiative deliver to users?
Confidence: How confident are you that this feature or initiative will be successful?
Effort: How much effort will it take to develop and implement this feature or initiative?
Check my previous article about how to use RICE in detail Click Here
Let's first, See how we can capture ideas into our Product Discovery Project.
To add an idea to Jira Product Discovery, simply create a new issue. You can provide a description of the idea, as well as any other relevant information, such as the problem that it solves, the target audience, and the value that it will deliver.
Another way to create your ideas on the go, If you are a Chrome User, you can use Jira Product Discovery Chrome Extention
Creating a RICE Custom View
One of the most powerful options of Jira Product Discovery is it gives you the flexibility to customize anything you want to match your way of work.
So you can tailor the tool as you wish and according to any approach, project, or framework you prefer.
Step 1: Create your Custom View
From the list on the left sidebar, click on ‘Create a view’
Select a New list view and give it a name.
You will notice, that by default all your added ideas are inherited.
Step 2: Add custom fields for the RICE framework.
from the ‘+’ icon on the table header, when you click on it, the list of current fields will appear to select from or you can create a new field.
By default, you will find both fields exist, Impact and Effort. so you are going to create new fields for Reach and Confident.
Click on the Create field, the creation form will slide from the right of the screen.
Type your new field name and select field type. In our case, we are going to select “Rating”.
Step3: Calculate the RICE Score
Once you finished creating the new fields needed for the prioritization formula, then the next step is to create the field that will show the RICE score.
Create a new field, but this time select the type “Custom Formula”
Add the expression for RICE the same as the following example
Note: Make sure of field names.
{Reach} * {Impact} * {Confidence} / {Effort}Sort your idea by RICE Score Field Descending, that’s it all.
Conclusion
In summary, Jira Product Discovery provides a robust platform to ideate, prioritize, and build roadmaps to determine what features to develop next.
The RICE prioritization framework complements Jira Product Discovery by offering a methodology to evaluate potential initiatives based on their reach, impact, confidence, and effort.
Together, these tools enable product teams to make data-driven decisions about where to focus their limited resources for maximum benefit.
By aligning development efforts to high-value outcomes, organizations can deliver the innovations users want and move their business strategies forward. The combination of Jira Product Discovery and the RICE framework offers an effective way to manage the product discovery process from initial ideas to launch.