Product operations is the unsung hero of product management. They orchestrate seamless collaboration between product teams and the rest of the business, making work more visible, decisions more transparent, and product development more efficient – all while maintaining the delicate balance of process and team autonomy.
While product ops can work magic with any tool at their disposal, the right tool can make their job much easier. Here are 5 ways Jira Product Discovery can help products ops, their product teams, and stakeholders stay in lockstep.
1. Centralize research and customer insights
More often than not, research, data, and customer interview notes are spread across docs, spreadsheets, or personal notes apps making them impossible to find and unhelpful to your team. To get the most out of your customer insights they must be easily accessible and organized. This reduces your time-to-discovery and ensures all stakeholders have the same level context so less time is spent persuading.
Use Jira Product Discovery to create a single of source of truth to capture any ideas and their related customer insights together in one place. This helps you:
- Link customer feedback to specific opportunities
- Quickly and easily surface insights for better discussions, and
- Validate features and prioritize based on research
2. Enable smarter decision-making
In product ops, part of your key responsibilities is to surface insights so product teams can make informed decisions and be able to confidently communicate to leadership why those decisions were made.
With Jira Product Discovery, you can set up prioritization frameworks, like RICE or impact vs effort, that make sense for each team while also allowing leadership to compare priorities “apples to apples”. For example, a platform team might weigh technical complexity heavily, while a customer-facing team focuses more on user impact – but all their efforts ladder up to impact the same goal. By implementing structured (but flexible!) data-backed prioritization methods you can:
- Facilitate transparent decision-making across teams
- Ensure consistency across how prioritization decisions are made
- Maintain team autonomy through flexible frameworks
3. Provide stakeholder visibility
Stakeholders frequently ask for updates on what teams are working on and whether the roadmaps they’re looking at are up-to-date – this is where product ops can really shine. The key to communicating roadmaps and progress effectively is giving stakeholders only the information they care about and just the right amount of it. Too little and you’re barraged with questions. Too much and they won’t even bother to look.
With Jira Product Discovery you can create living, tailored (and dare we say beautiful) roadmaps and views out of the same data so it’s less work for you and easy for stakeholders to consume – win, win. Using Jira Product Discovery’s custom and flexible views, you can:
- Help leadership easily view and understand priorities across their teams
- Reduce time spent creating and updating roadmaps
- Empower stakeholders to make informed decisions with more visibility into roadmaps
4. Connect strategy to delivery
One of the most valuable roles product ops can play is bridging the gap between strategy and execution. It’s not just about improving the handoff between product and engineering teams, but also ensuring engineering is involved when prioritization begins so they know what’s coming to their team’s backlog and when.
Jira Product Discovery provides a dedicated space for product and engineering to have those conversations. Once an idea is ready to move from exploration to implementation, link related Jira epics and issues in just a few clicks. All the context – from problem definition to solution validation – travels with the work so engineers don’t just see what needs to be built; they understand why it matters and how it connects to company goals. By connecting strategy to delivery, you can:
- Create a unified workflow from discovery to delivery in a single platform
- Show clear connections across high-level strategy, ideas, and development work
- Provide product and engineering dedicated, but connected, workspaces
- Easily report on roadmap progress to leadership without getting into the details
5. Close the feedback loop
Product teams often receive a myriad of requests from across the business, their customers, and come up with their own through research. Just as feedback is captured in a number of different tools, ideas and requests are also scattered across spreadsheets, Slack messages, and other apps making it hard to triage. It’s not realistic to think an organization can just use one or even a few tools – different teams will use the tools that work best for them.
To close the loop and ensure good ideas don’t slip through the cracks, product operations can connect Jira Product Discovery with a variety of tools to capture and centralize ideas and insights. Use our Chrome extension to capture insights from anywhere on the web like forums or competitors; integrate with Salesforce to link ideas to customer opportunities; create idea forms in Jira Product Discovery to standardize request submissions from across the business.
By integrating with other tools, product ops can:
- Centralize intake across customers and internal stakeholders
- Create team rituals for regular reviews of feedback and requests
- Keep product backlog and prioritization of the backlog in a single tool
Product operations doesn’t have an easy job – working across dozens of different tools and aligning dozens more stakeholders – they are the backbone of the product management organization. But with Jira Product Discovery (and the 5 use cases we shared above), we can support their cross-functional collaboration and communication, alignment, and visibility efforts for product teams and their stakeholders. Give it a try for free in Jira Product Discovery.