What is Jira Product Discovery and Who is it for?

✨ Looking for a better Jira Product Discovery alternative with a native Jira integration? Check out Featurebase →

If you use Jira for product management and development, you've probably been looking for a tool to tie customer feedback to your everyday work. With so many third-party apps that do just this, it was a matter of time before Jira released its own product, called Jira Product Discovery.

With Jira Product Discovery Projects, you can collect, analyze, and prioritize feedback, create roadmaps, and see the delivery work happening in a more structured manner.

Here's what Jira Product Discovery is and how it can help you bring structure to your team-managed projects. 👇

What is Product Discovery by Jira?

Jira Product Discovery is a tool by Atlassian that helps product teams manage and prioritize ideas, collaborate on product strategy, and ensure alignment across teams.

It is part of the Jira ecosystem, but it focuses specifically on the discovery phase of product development, where ideas and insights are gathered, refined, and prepared for implementation and development.

For product managers who realized that handling feature requests with Jira is not the best option, this product is a blessing.

Top features

• Idea management: Capture and organize product ideas, such as feature requestse, in a centralized location with rich formatting, tags, and categorization.
• Prioritization frameworks: Use built-in prioritization methods like scoring matrices or custom criteria to evaluate and rank ideas according to different product management frameworks.
• Integration with Jira: Seamlessly connect discovery work with delivery teams, ensuring a smooth transition from idea to execution between JPD and other Jira projects. It integrates with Jira Goals, Jira Service Management, Confluence, and the main Jira product to make your team workflow easy.
• Roadmaps: Use roadmaps, Kanban boards, or lists to visualize ideas, their progress, and priorities.
• Feedback aggregation: Collect insights and feedback from different stakeholders, users, or team members to refine and validate ideas.
• Collaboration tools: Enable cross-team collaboration with comments, mentions, customizable views, and integrations with communication platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

In short, you can create and manage a JPD project to consolidate customer feedback and information for developers and product managers in one place.

P.S. You might want to consider these better Jira Product Discovery alternatives if this doesn't sound like a good fit.

Who is Jira Product Discovery for?

Jira Product Discovery is built for business and tech teams that want to collect and analyze user feedback, prioritize ideas, and foster team collaboration. However, there are specific groups of users that can benefit more greatly from using Jira Product Discovery projects.

1. Existing Jira users

If your developers and product managers already use Jira for project management, tracking issues, resolving bugs, and meeting larger business objectives, this product will be a natural fit.

With Jira Product Discovery, you can tie new feedback items to existing Jira projects and streamline the process from receiving feedback to resolving it, all in a centralized location. You can add date fields, numeric fields, or any custom field you need for a JPD project.

In other words, you can gather ideas, analyze and prioritize them, hand over the issue to the development, add it to a product roadmap and product teams, and see it through to completion in one app.

2. Product managers

Jira Product Discovery is an easy-to-use platform for product teams that need to collect user feedback and align it with the overarching product and development goals.

This tool streamlines idea management and prioritization and allows product managers to collaborate within their own team and externally with developers, designers, QA engineers, and others. From a blank project to a fleshed-out feature, you'll find new product opportunities and ideas to turn user feedback into new revenue.

3. Cross-functional teams

While the main Jira platform is more suited for tech teams, Jira Product Discovery can be used by everyone: sales teams, product managers, customer service, customer success, marketing, and just about anyone in your organization.

Anyone whose job (or part of it) is to collect feedback in some shape or form can stay on the same page with Jira Product Discovery.

✨ Start collecting & managing feedback with Featurebase for free →

How Jira Product Discovery works

A typical Jira Product Discovery workflow looks like this:

1. Create a discovery project
2. Add product ideas
3. Attach user feedback and insights
4. Add fields for prioritization
5. Create views for different stakeholders
6. Score and prioritize ideas
7. Build a product roadmap
8. Connect selected ideas to Jira Software

The exact setup depends on your team.

Some teams start with a blank project and build their own workflow. Others use templates and customize them over time. Team-managed projects can be useful when product teams want more control over their own fields, views, and processes.

Here are the main concepts to understand.

Ideas

Ideas are the core items in a Jira Product Discovery project.

An idea can be a feature request, customer problem, product opportunity, solution concept, internal request, or roadmap candidate.

Each idea can include details like description, status, owner, feedback, insights, effort, impact, and links to other Jira issues.

Views

Views let teams look at the same ideas in different ways.

For example, a product manager might use:

• An ideas list to review all requests
• A board view to show progress
• A roadmap view to communicate plans
• A matrix view to compare impact and effort
• A stakeholder view for leadership or sales

This is helpful because different stakeholders need different levels of detail.

Fields

Fields add structure to ideas.

Teams can use fields to track impact, effort, confidence, customer value, revenue, product area, roadmap timing, and more.

Jira Product Discovery supports different field types, including date fields, numeric fields, labels, and custom fields.

Prioritization scores

Prioritization scores help teams compare ideas.

A simple example is impact vs effort. An idea with high impact and low effort might be a quick win. An idea with high impact and high effort might need deeper planning. An idea with low impact and high effort may not be worth doing.

Teams can also create more advanced scoring models based on their own product management process.

Roadmaps

Roadmaps help product teams communicate what is planned, what is being explored, and what is already in progress.

A roadmap in Jira Product Discovery can be internal, stakeholder-facing, or tied to delivery work in Jira Software.

Jira Software integration

Jira Product Discovery integrates with Jira Software and other Atlassian tools.

This lets teams connect product discovery to delivery work, so an idea in JPD can link to issues, tasks, epics, or other Jira projects.

It also works well for teams using Jira Service Management, Confluence, and other Atlassian tools as part of their workflow.

Jira Product Discovery vs Jira Software

Jira Product Discovery and Jira Software are related, but they solve different problems.

Jira Product Discovery is for discovery, prioritization, and product planning. While, Jira Software is for issue tracking, sprint planning, and engineering delivery.

Jira Software is where development teams manage tasks, bugs, sprint work, and releases.

Jira Product Discovery is where product teams manage ideas, user feedback, product opportunities, and roadmap decisions before work reaches development.

You do not need Jira Software to use Jira Product Discovery. But JPD is most useful when teams already use Jira Software or other Atlassian tools.

Jira Product Discovery limitations

Jira Product Discovery can bring structure to product discovery, but there are a few limitations to know before choosing it.

It is not a full customer feedback portal

Jira Product Discovery can help organize user feedback, but it is not mainly built as a customer-facing feedback portal.

If you want customers to submit feature requests, vote on ideas, follow roadmap progress, and get updates when features ship, you may need a dedicated feedback platform.

It is less suited for public voting boards

JPD is useful for internal prioritization, but public voting is not its main use case.

For teams that want users and customers to vote on ideas, a tool like Featurebase is usually a better fit.

Customer communication is limited

Collecting feedback is only one part of the process.

Teams also need to close the loop with users. That means telling customers when an idea is planned, in progress, shipped, or declined.

Jira Product Discovery can help internal teams manage ideas, but it is not designed around customer communication in the same way dedicated feedback tools are.

It can feel Atlassian-heavy

Jira Product Discovery works best when your team already uses Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Confluence, and other Atlassian tools.

If your product team does not already work in Jira, JPD may feel heavier than necessary.

It still needs a clear process

A JPD project can become messy if nobody owns the workflow.

Teams still need to decide:

• Who can create ideas
• Which fields matter
• How ideas are scored
• Who reviews feedback
• When ideas move to delivery
• How roadmap changes are communicated

The tool can bring structure, but it cannot create a good product process by itself.

Pricing and plans

The Jira Product Discovery pricing model offers three plans. Each plan comes with a 17% discount for annual payments. Additionally, the more users you have, the lower the price per user becomes.

• The Free plan is free forever for up to three creators. You get unlimited contributions per site, 2GB of file storage, 200 rule runs per month, project workflows, and project roles.
• The Standard plan starts at $10 per creator per month. You can get unlimited creators, 250GB of file storage, and 500 rule runs per month. On top of everything from the Free plan, you also get custom project roles and data residency.
• The Premium plan starts at $25 per creator per month. On top of unlimited creators, it includes unlimited file storage and 1,000 monthly rule runs. Besides the features from Standard, it also comes with admin insights, release tracks, IP allowlisting, Atlassian AI, and more. This is the only plan that includes Roadmaps and view permissions.

Each plan comes with a free 14-day trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

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✨ Featurebase—The best Jira Product Discovery alternative for product teams

Jira Product Discovery is an interesting idea management tool. However, to get the most out of it, you really need to use Jira's other products. Even if you do, this is still not the best choice.

Featurebase (👋 that's us) is a modern Jira Product Discovery alternative with powerful feedback boards, roadmaps, changelogs, and more. We natively integrate with Jira, so you can turn your feedback into actionable Jira issues for your engineers.

In addition to that, we have tons of powerful features that JPD doesn't offer at all:

• Feedback boards with feature voting
• Automated status updates to let users know when their request is completed
• Roadmaps that can be public, private, or limited to certain user groups
• In-app feedback widgets (see live demo)
• Prioritize feedback based on revenue, company size, and much more
• AI-based feedback organization and analysis
• Surveys (like NPS, CSAT, etc.)
• Changelogs for communicating new features and bug fixes
• Knowledge base for keeping your product information in one place
• Integrations with Linear, Slack, Jira, Zapier, ClickUp, Github, and many other tools
• And so much more...

We have affordable pricing with a free plan, and onboarding is incredibly quick, so there's no downside to trying it. 😉

✨ Start collecting & managing feedback with Featurebase for free →