Jira Product Discovery projects overview

What is a discovery project?

A discovery project is a dedicated space to collect and organize your ideas, insights, and roadmaps for an individual team or product. It’s where your uncertain work happens - evaluating ideas, validating them with insights, and testing prototypes.

You can find your projects or create a new one in the top navigation under the Projects dropdown.

If you’re a Jira Software user, you may be familiar with team-managed and company-managed project types. Jira Product Discovery projects are team-managed only, meaning projects are administered and managed at the team level for more autonomy over processes and practices within a self-contained space.

Changes in a team-managed project can also be implemented without requiring the help of a Jira administrator. And, because each project is configured independently, a change in one project does not impact any other projects.

What are the key elements of a Jira Product Discovery project

Discovery projects are made up of a few key elements to help you stay organized during product discovery.

Ideas - Your discovery project is made of ideas. Ideas can be opportunities, problems, or potential solutions that you have for your product or project.
Insights - An idea is great. But it is even more powerful when enriched with data and insights. Insights can be customer quotes or feedback, product data, market research, or feedback from customer-facing teams.
Fields - Fields are granular sets of criteria or traits that can help you describe, compare, and prioritize ideas. Fields can be goals, effort level, business impact, and more.
Views - Views let you organize and present ideas in a way that works best for you and your stakeholders. Views are highly customizable and can be formatted as a list, matrix, board, or timeline.

How to set up a project in Jira Product Discovery

To create a new discovery project:

Click on the Projects dropdown and select Create project
Choose Product management or Software development under Project templates
Click the Product discovery template and follow the prompts to get started

Discovery project best practices

When you set up your project, there are a few best practices to keep in mind depending on your use case.

Team setup

While Jira Product Discovery was designed to work best when one project is used by an individual team, an individual project can also be used by multiple teams. If used by multiple teams or squads, it’s best to create sections within your project or naming conventions to easily identify which ideas, views, and roadmaps belong to which team.

Demo: using a single project for multiple products and teams

Using a discovery project for idea intake

If you’re using Jira Product Discovery for idea intake, we recommend using one of the following methods to capture feedback and requests from stakeholders and customers:

Set up a Jira Service Management queue to receive feedback from customers and internal teams
Set up a dedicated Slack channel #product-feedback to receive feedback from internal teams (also works with Teams)
Share views with other teams and gather their feedback using fields and votes to receive feedback from internal teams

Leveraging practices with Jira Product Discovery

Learn from the Head of Product for Jira Product Discovery on how his team handles product feedback, builds product roadmaps, creates a loop between discovery and delivery, and communicates progress to stakeholders.

Watch webinar: How to uplevel your product discovery practice with Jira Product Discovery