How to Manage Product Feedback in Jira

For a product manager, dealing with customer feedback is essential for driving product success. However, managing feature requests from different teams and channels can be overwhelming. This article explores how Jira can be transformed into more than a bug-tracking tool, becoming a solid foundation for product feedback management.

Collecting Feedback in Jira

Imagine the feedback management journey as follows:

Feedback Collection → Centralized Storage → Categorization → Prioritization → Validation → Implementation.

The first crucial step in this journey is collecting customer feedback. Jira offers several ways of doing this.

Jira Issue Collector

The Jira Issue Collector is a feedback collection form that can be embedded on a website page using HTML. It allows users to submit feedback directly to Jira without logging in or navigating the Jira platform. This method is particularly useful for gathering feedback from external users or customers who may not be familiar with Jira.

Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management (JSM) is a well-known solution for working with customer support requests. But did you know it can also be a powerful tool for managing customer feedback? Let’s explore how you can leverage this functionality.

1. Kickstart the process by creating the Jira Service Management project.
2. Define a specific issue type or use the default feature suggestion types.
   
   
3. Assign feature suggestion types to a separate queue. This makes categorizing and filtering feedback a breeze.
   
   
4. Tailor the workflow to mirror feedback management stages such as “Submitted,” “Under Review,” “In Progress,” “Planned,” “Completed,” and “Declined.”
5. Finally, set up the Jira automation rules. Automate duplication of issues in Jira Software for delivery when a feature suggestion enters the “In Progress” stage. Or close linked ideas when feature delivery is completed.
   
   

If you’re eager to learn more about setting up Jira Service Management, the Atlassian website is a treasure trove of information.

Customer Case for Jira Cloud

Sometimes, it’s inconvenient to mix product and service requests within one Jira project. Feedback requests, after all, necessitate their own workflow, handling processes, and a team to address them. Moreover, this approach inadvertently leads to extra JSM agent licenses.

Customer Case for Jira Cloud allows creating a feedback portal from any Jira Cloud project, which helps to keep product ideas backlog separate from a support one. Unlike the solutions mentioned, all the ideas on a feedback portal are visible to all visitors. They can comment on ideas, vote for them, add new ones, and engage with other users about their use cases, thereby forming a user community.

What’s more, the feedback forum can be used seamlessly with Jira Service Management. Simply map the Customer Case portal to the external resources in your service project to make it visible to your customers.

Read more about use cases with Jira Service Management and Customer Case.

One of the standout features of the Customer Case app is that even stakeholders without Jira licenses can post and act on feedback in Jira via the portal or track the progress of a project by filtering ideas by status.

Best Practices for Storing Omnichannel Product Feedback

Once you’ve decided on the tools for feedback collection, the next step is to make centralized storage. Having all feedback in one place makes it easy for the entire team to access and reference it. This reduces the chances of feedback getting lost or overlooked.

Slack

Slack might not be specifically designed for storing feedback, but it is certainly a powerful ally in this task.

Establish a channel dedicated to feedback, for example, #product-feedback or #feature-requests. If your customer-facing team members share all the valuable feedback in this space, you’ll never lose a single nugget of insight from customer interactions.

Slack can be integrated with Jira to convert Slack messages into Jira tickets. It simplifies capturing feedback and ensures it is logged and tracked in Jira. 

Confluence

While Slack is about immediate feedback and real-time conversations, Confluence shines in structuring and organizing feedback. Confluence offers spaces, pages, and templates, which allow you to categorize and store feedback for easy retrieval. You can also integrate Confluence with Jira to link feedback directly to development tasks.

Go further and connect project documentation and resources in Confluence with Jira using the Project Pages feature. Project Pages can be linked to related pages, documents, or external tools, creating a cohesive knowledge ecosystem right in Jira. It means you don’t need to leave Jira to access project docs.

Miro

Miro is a collaboration platform that allows for the visualization of complex ideas through diagrams, wireframes, and mind maps.

With Miro, you can create a feedback board with idea cards to capture customer feedback, including the creator’s information, idea description, attachments, and other relevant details.

Then, share the board with customers to allow them to comment, react, and engage in the feedback process.

Miro’s integration with Jira provides a smooth transition between the two platforms. Ideas chosen for implementation can directly link to Jira tickets from Miro, giving developers immediate access to the necessary context and simplifying the development process.

Here we go again: Jira

If all the ideas eventually end up in Jira for development, why not adopt it as a hub for omnichannel feedback? Here are a few reasons for that:

• Seamless Workflow: No need to switch between other feedback solutions and Jira. The entire feedback workflow, from collection to implementation, can be managed within Jira.
• Integration with devtools: Jira allows linking feedback to code changes and ensuring the development process is aligned with feature requirements.
• Jira Automations: Swiftly categorize and respond to customer feedback, follow up with customers, and even generate insightful reports to identify emerging feedback trends.

💡A good practice is to dedicate Jira Product Discovery to collecting all ideas and feature requests. Make a deal with a team to feed all the user stories and hypotheses into the Jira Product Discovery project. Then, collaborate, prioritize, and build a roadmap for validated ideas.

Each tool mentioned is perfectly capable of handling omnichannel feedback. But we believe when they work together, each one contributing at the right stage, it creates a more effective and cohesive workflow for managing product feedback.

Recap on Product Feedback Management in Jira

While our focus has been primarily on gathering and storing feedback, we did touch on the potential of some tools that could streamline further stages. Understanding the strength of each, we can recommend the following workflow for feedback management in Jira:

1. Use Jira Issue Collector, Jira Service Management, or the Customer Case app to collect customer feedback directly. Or combine these channels.
2. Adopt Slack to streamline idea-sharing across your company.
3. Use Jira as centralized storage for omnichannel product feedback.
4. Use Miro boards to convey complex ideas and link them to Jira issues.
5. Take advantage of Jira Product Discovery to prioritize and validate collected feedback.
6. Connect Jira Software to Confluence with the Project Pages feature to provide context for development.
7. When it’s time to bring those validated ideas to life, Jira Software is here and all set.

Why Jira is Hard for Product People

Jira is a part of almost every product manager’s daily life. But rumor has it Jira is hard for them.  To dig deeper, we’ve surveyed more than 20 product people worldwide. In this article, we share the most common pain points with Jira and suggest solutions to optimize product work with it.

How Product Managers Use Jira 

It’s easy to accept that no two сompanies are alike, and the same goes for the Jira instances. You don’t need to look too closely to spot the differences between two projects in the same instance. Despite that, you can easily find product managers who use Jira to:

• Write and update epics, stories, and other issues that define the work to be done.
• Plan upcoming sprints or work phases – depending on the flavor of agile or delivery approach they use.
• Track work-in-progress as it goes from ‘to-do’ to ‘done.’
• Refine the backlog.
• Grapple with changes in scope, hopefully before, but sometimes after work has started!

On top of this, product managers need to manage stakeholders. A colorful cast of individuals and teams from sales, marketing, legal, senior management, and, let’s not forget, the customers and their users. Each person has their wish list, priorities, likes, and dislikes.

While Jira is essential, it doesn’t provide all the tools product managers need to get the bigger picture on objectives and roadmap, collate customer feedback and feature ideas, and effectively communicate to all sorts of customers and stakeholders. Atlassian introduced Jira Product Discovery and Atlas as steps toward managing these activities. However, too many tools scatter information, decreasing productivity and decision-making.

Why Product Managers Struggle with Jira

Steep Learning Curve

As mentioned before, every Jira instance is a unique beast. For a product manager trying to get to grips with the team’s Jira, it can feel like learning to ride a bike at an Olympic velodrome while everyone else happily speeds around.

Every aspect of Jira can be tweaked and tailored – instance and project configurations, permissions, workflows, automations, apps, and more. When you learn most of them, you see how complex the software is under the curtain of a simple interface. So it can be challenging for new users to understand how everything works.

Some product managers who described themselves as not very tech-savvy find the Jira terminology confusing. With many ways to define and organize work – projects, issue types, boards, backlogs, sprints, and reports – it can be challenging to find what they need.

Other respondents talked about their frustration with the Atlassian documentation, finding it ok for troubleshooting but less helpful for understanding best practices in how to set up and use Jira effectively.

💡The Atlassian user community is a great place to ask questions, even if you don’t know the right words to use. Give plenty of detail, share what you have tried and what you expect to see. Finally, remember that the people answering questions generally do not work for Atlassian and are volunteering their time to help you and others. 

Agility Bottlenecks

Once our product manager starts to understand the ‘happy path’ of a project’s workflow in Jira, they need to manage the work and set the direction for others. At first, they can focus on the fresh issues, but sooner or later, they’ll have to confront the pile of older ones.

However, this is not always simple. Imagine a large project with thousands of issues – different types, statuses, and creators, all added at different times with different levels of detail. Inevitably some are duplicates; others are stuck in limbo or even irrelevant to the project. Each is a distraction to our busy product manager.

So, they start to tidy them up, but it turns out they can’t transition an issue from its current state to the one in the ‘happy path.’ They check with a team member who, surprisingly, can see the transition option, but neither understand why they see different things. Eventually, their Jira admin finds that the transition is limited to a custom group of users. But think for a moment about how much working time was wasted in just this one example.

We’ll cover the administration and configuration below, but the key message is that processes and tools are put ahead of individuals, which goes against the core value of Agile. As a result, product managers spend more time driving the tool and less time focused on their customers and outcomes.

Jira Permissions Hell

A product manager’s frustrations with Jira don’t stop there. Once they’ve begun to see Jira’s potential, they found themselves blocked by permissions having to interact with an issue multiple times to complete a single update. Or these are the required fields that seemingly have no purpose that slow them down.

They gradually form an idea of how they want Jira to work, but again they are blocked. They don’t have the Jira administration permissions to do so. Even if they did have those permissions, they don’t know what needs to change.

Jira allows you to do certain things that you’re not aware of. But a user doesn’t have ‘permissions/privileges’ set up to perform those actions. So a user thinks it is a limitation of Jira. Moreover, because the option simply does not appear, a user doesn’t know that such functionality (or button) is something that exists and that they just need to ask someone for permission or higher privileges.

Vinit Karandikar, Principal Product Manager

💡To have a better idea of what Jira is capable of, you can check out the Atlassian University or Linkedin Learning courses. It helps you talk to the Jira admin on the same wavelength, express your requirements more clearly, and understand how to improve team processes with Jira.

Persuading team members and the Jira admin about the benefits of their proposed changes is the next hurdle, especially when those changes touch on existing projects and issues.  

One product manager told us how they inherited a Jira workflow with a ‘To Do’ state, and a ‘Ready’ state and an ‘Open’ state, and no one in the team understood the difference or why it was that way!

Convincing the team to change it required multiple meetings, and then they needed to wait for the Jira admin to find time to implement the changes.

The problem multiplies when there’s no ‘Jira superman’ (as one respondent described their admin) who knows the Jira instance like the back of their hand and can quickly make changes or help stuck team members. Atlassian’s move towards ‘team-managed projects’ is a step forward, but it only increases the need for more team members to become savvy with Jira.

Customer Collaboration Dilemma

Once a product manager is comfortable with the Jira’s setup, they typically need a way to record customer inputs and give their customers visibility of the product backlog. After all, customer engagement is crucial to steer the product in the right direction. They can use the Jira issue comments to capture customer insights, and users can vote for issues and ‘watch’ them to be notified of updates.

But many organizations do not want to give customers or internal stakeholders full access to Jira. There are three big reasons why.

• Firstly, the cost. Jira bills per user but not everyone needs the full capabilities. It can become costly, especially for smaller teams with a large customer or stakeholder base. This is particularly the case for teams that want to provide a customer support portal with Jira, where the Jira Service Management price per agent can be too high for some teams.
• Secondly, there is the admin overhead. Managing dozens or hundreds of extra users can be tedious. Users need setup, permissions, and deactivation once they leave the organization or no longer need access.
• Finally, many customers and internal stakeholders don’t want to touch Jira. The same challenges of learning Jira still apply. Plus, many don’t have the time to search the bottomless pit of the Jira issues just to add a comment or track progress.

It poses the dilemma of finding a viable and cost-effective way to collaborate with customers.

💡Many teams use the Customer Case app’s portal for Jira Cloud to capture customers’ ideas and bugs. The app transforms any Jira project into an ideation platform or helpdesk, which allows collaboration with your customers or teammates via the ‘Jira mirror.’ It helps you tackle the collaboration dilemma since it both provides a cleaner overall experience and exempts you from

• Extra costs for the customer’s Jira licenses
• Extra efforts for the Jira user account management

Take our client’s word for it👇.

We are glad of your support solution because it is much simpler than Jira solution. For a small consulting company like us, this would be overhead. As well as costs. For us your solution is perfect for our own company size.

Marco Vögeli, Senior Consultant & Partner at Expris

🚀Soon, the app will be integrated with Jira Product Discovery. It enables mapping a customer forum to the Jira Product Discovery project and capturing client feedback directly.

Jira Can Be Easy

We found that many product managers’ pains are common experiences. It’s key to remember that you don’t need to ‘bear the burden’ alone. Share your hurdles with team members and collaboratively strategize to overcome them. As it turned out, all the pains have treatments. Utilize the rich resources of Atlassian – the user community, solution partners, and marketplace apps. They can help you understand the possibilities, customize the platform to your needs, streamline your workflow, and efficiently deliver value to your customers. When you make Jira work for you, it won’t take long to say, ‘Jira is Easy.’

What are your hurdles with Jira? Let us know what you think.