Atlassian Product Discovery handbook
Why did we write this handbook?
For over three years now, our team has been hard at work building Jira Product Discovery, a new product management solution from Atlassian. Along the way, we’ve spoken to hundreds of product managers. They’ve shared their pain points, desires, and the things they need to grow in their careers.
Today, Jira Product Discovery is used by hundreds of product teams and has great market traction. We credit that to the experiences these product managers have shared, which allowed us to build a tool with their needs in mind.
Along the way, we’ve learned a lot about the product management discipline. In this guide, we’ve decided to share that knowledge.
Our team doesn’t claim we’ve found the single best approach to product management. Instead, we describe the promises and pitfalls of different product management techniques, and how they can come to life in Jira Product Discovery.
Even if your PM team doesn’t use Jira Product Discovery, we wrote this handbook to help you elevate your processes and achieve the outcomes your team cares about.
We cover:
- Using outcomes to guide product management
- Creating and organizing a product backlog
- Realizing outcomes with product ideas, from inception to delivery
- Validating ideas with feedback and insights, and how to gather them
- Prioritizing the highest-impact ideas for effective product development
- Creating roadmaps teams and stakeholders can rally behind
We hope that you can learn from our experiences to improve your own product discovery process, and keep accomplishing amazing things.
What can you expect from this handbook?
This handbook is meant to be pragmatic and actionable. We explain the methods behind this outcomes-focused, insights-driven way of working, and how to implement them on your team.
You’ll come away from the Product Discovery Handbook with:
- A solid understanding of product management practices and methods
- Examples of how Atlassian applies these practices within our own teams
- Practical advice on how to apply these practices using Jira Product Discovery
The first few sections lay out the theories that underlie product management best practices. As you progress, the handbook contains more practical examples.
From managing projects to products?
In this section, we will explain the principles behind the product-centric approach, which is critical to adopting product discovery in your team.
Great UX has become essential to compete in most industries. Gone are the days where you could ship an app, move on and never worry about updating it. If the users’ experience isn’t good enough — and doesn’t constantly improve in line with their needs — you might lose your customers to competitors, even if their product serves the same basic purpose.
This puts pressure on every company to borrow from the playbook of successful tech companies, who created this philosophy of continuous improvement and experimentation.
At Atlassian we are lucky to have 300,000 customers — successful in both tech and numerous other industries — and we’ve learned a lot about what makes them tick. Now, we’re on a journey to unlock every team’s potential by sharing what we’ve learned over the last two decades.
Towards an outcome-led product model
One key ingredient of this new way of working? The shift to a product-centric approach, guided by outcomes, and away from a project-centric approach, focused on outputs.
There are several key differences between these two approaches outlined in the table below.
| | Project-centric approach | Product-centric approach |
|---|---|---|
| Time span | Project-centric approach Projects are limited in time. | Product-centric approach Products live on for as long as you have customers. |
| Teams | Project-centric approach Once a project is delivered, the project team is disbanded and the output of their work is transitioned to another team to maintain. | Product-centric approach The product team is permanent and constantly iterates on the product experience based on learnings. |
| Success metrics | Project-centric approach A project’s success is often defined as shipping specific scope (e.g. features) on budget and on time. | Product-centric approach A product’s success is defined as delivering key results for the business (typically users and/or revenue). The scope and timing of shipping is secondary. |
What's next?
In the next section of this handbook, we’ll further explore using outcomes to guide product management.
Then, we’ll cover:
- Using outcomes to guide product work
- Creating and organizing a product backlog
- Realizing outcomes with product ideas, from inception to delivery
- Validating ideas with feedback and insights, and how to gather them
- Prioritizing the highest-impact ideas for effective product development
- Creating roadmaps teams and stakeholders can rally behind
After reading this guide, you’ll understand the fundamentals of product management, and be ready to implement them with your team.
Insights
In Jira Software, insights helps the team make data-driven decisions without leaving their current context. Insights source data from your Jira boards and projects to present aggregated views of your team’s historical progress. Insights are currently available for scrum metrics in both company-managed and team-managed projects.
Integrations
In Jira Software, an app (sometimes called an add-on or plugin) is an installable component that supplements or enhances the functionality of your instance. You and your teams can spend less time managing work and more time building great software with over 3,000 Jira Software apps that can be custom-tailored to fit any and every use case.