Your engineering team lives in Jira. They're focused, heads-down, and shipping code. Their world is structured, planned, and ticketed.
But your world? The world of product discovery? It’s a mess.
It’s the "fuzzy front-end," as they call it. Ideas live in spreadsheets. Feedback is buried in Slack threads. Customer quotes are lost in emails. Your roadmap is a PowerPoint slide that’s out-of-date the second you save it. You spend your days manually stitching this chaos together, trying to create a clean, developer-ready ticket. You're constantly pushing a ball uphill, just to see if the view is worth it.
Atlassian built Jira Product Discovery (JPD) to fix this. To give the messy, unstructured work of discovery a proper home, right next door to the structured world of delivery. But is it any good? Does it actually help you let the ball roll downhill?
Let’s count down the top 10 features that matter, from the nice-to-haves to the absolute game-changers.
#10. Workflow Automation
Let’s start with the least glamorous feature, because it solves a very real problem. When you invite everyone to give you ideas, you get a lot of ideas. A firehose of them. Manually triaging every single one is a fast track to burnout.
This is where JPD’s simple automation engine comes in. It’s the quiet, unsung hero. You can set up simple rules:
When a new idea is created, automatically add a “Needs Triage” label and assign it to the right PM.
When a support ticket in Jira Service Management is tagged as a "Feature Request," automatically create an idea in your JPD project.
It’s the process glue. It stops things from falling through the cracks and saves you from a mountain of admin. It’s not flashy, but it’s what allows you to scale collaboration without drowning in it.
#9. Confluence Integration
A great idea is more than a title. It has a backstory. It’s connected to market research, user interviews, or a grander strategic plan. That context usually lives in Confluence.
The JPD and Confluence integration builds a bridge between the two. You can embed live, always-up-to-date JPD roadmaps directly into your Confluence strategy docs. No more screenshots. No more "is this the latest version?"
More importantly, you can link an idea back to the detailed Confluence page. This creates a "golden thread." A developer can pick up a ticket in Jira, click through to the idea in JPD to see the why, and then click through again to the Confluence doc to get the entire strategic backstory. It stops the endless "hey, can you give me some context on this?" questions.
#8. Collaborative Feedback Loops
Product management shouldn't be a solo sport. You need input from sales, support, marketing… everyone. But buying a full software license for someone who just wants to drop in an idea once a month? That’s a tough sell.
JPD’s pricing model is a feature in itself. You have a few paid "Creators" (that’s you, the PM) and unlimited free "Contributors."
Contributors can add ideas, comment, vote, and link insights. For free.
This one small change removes the financial friction that kills cross-team collaboration. It lets you swing the doors open and invite everyone into the process. The more people you have contributing, the smarter your decisions become.
#7. Seamless Jira Software Integration
This is it. This is the killer feature. If you’re already using Jira for development, this is JPD’s unfair advantage.
Third-party roadmapping tools always have a clunky, painful sync with Jira. It’s a constant headache of mapping fields and fixing broken connections. JPD lives inside Jira, so the connection is native, deep, and seamless.
When an idea is ready, you create or link an epic in Jira Software with a click. From then on, the two are connected.
For your engineers: They see a panel on their Jira epic that shows the original idea, the problem statement, and all the customer evidence. The context is right where they work.
For you: You see a delivery progress bar on your idea in JPD that updates in real-time as the epic moves through the workflow.
It’s an unbroken link from a vague concept to shipped code. It closes the gap between the discovery and delivery teams for good.
#6. Customizable Roadmaps
Stop making roadmaps in PowerPoint. Just stop. They're static, a pain to update, and create endless version control problems.
In JPD, a roadmap isn't a separate document; it's just a view of your ideas. The most common format is the simple "Now, Next, Later" board. It’s powerful because it forces a conversation about priority, not about hitting an arbitrary date.
But the real magic is creating different roadmaps for different audiences from the same source of truth.
A Now, Next, Later board for your internal team.
A Timeline view filtered for enterprise features to show the sales team.
A board grouped by Strategic Goals for your leadership meeting.
One set of ideas, one source of truth. Many ways to tell the story. You spend less time updating slides and more time talking strategy.
But sharing a raw JPD view outside your immediate team can be messy and confusing. For communicating your vision broadly, you can extend JPD with a tool like Released to create a single, polished portal. This gives both internal stakeholders and customers a curated place to see what’s next, vote on ideas, and stay aligned with your product strategy.
#5. Flexible Visualization (Views)
Beyond roadmaps, JPD’s "Views" are your toolkit for looking at the same set of ideas from different angles.
The best example is the Matrix View. Plot your ideas on a 2x2 grid with "Impact" on one axis and "Effort" on the other. Instantly, you see the landscape: the quick wins, the big bets, the thankless tasks, and the money pits.
It's a simple, visual way to facilitate a prioritization workshop. It gets everyone on the same page and helps you make tough trade-off decisions together. Sometimes, changing your perspective is all it takes to find the answer.
#4. Advanced Scoring with Custom Formulas
Prioritization can feel like a battle of opinions. The loudest voice in the room often wins. Formulas bring a dose of objectivity to the process.
You can build your own scoring systems, like the classic RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) model. You define the formula: (Reach * Impact * Confidence) / Effort. JPD does the math.
This doesn't mean you blindly follow the score. The real value is that it changes the conversation. Instead of arguing about whether an idea is "big," you're forced to have a focused discussion: "Do we all agree the 'Reach' for this is 5,000 customers? Is our 'Confidence' really 80%?"
It forces you to define your terms and defend your estimates. It makes prioritization a data-informed exercise, not just a gut-feel guess.
#3. Dynamic Prioritization with Custom Fields
Before you can score anything, you need to define what matters. This is where custom fields come in. JPD lets you build your own prioritization machine, tailored to your company's unique strategy.
Don't just use the default "Impact" and "Effort." Create the fields that matter to you.
A dropdown for "Strategic Goals" (e.g., Increase Retention, Expand to Enterprise).
A multi-select for "Target Persona."
A number field for "Competitive Risk."
This is how you codify your strategy into your day-to-day tool. It ensures every idea is measured against the things that will actually move the business forward. You’re not just managing a backlog; you’re steering the product.
#2. The Insight-Gathering Ecosystem
Great ideas and critical feedback are scattered everywhere. A Slack message from a sales rep. A support ticket from a frustrated customer. A competitor's website you're analyzing.
JPD's insight-gathering tools act like a vacuum cleaner for all this scattered evidence.
The Chrome extension lets you highlight text on any webpage and send it directly to an idea in JPD as an "insight." The Jira Service Management integration turns customer feedback tickets into a structured intake funnel. The Slack integration captures those crucial conversations.
It gives you a way to pull all the supporting evidence into one place and attach it to the relevant idea. It transforms an opinion into a data-backed proposal.
And while these tools are great for capturing existing feedback, you can create a more proactive "front door" for new customer ideas. A tool like Released extends JPD with a dedicated Feedback portal where customers can submit and vote on suggestions, giving you a clean, organized source of validated ideas.
#1. Centralized Idea Management
And here we are at number one. The most fundamental feature of all.
Jira Product Discovery creates a dedicated home for all the "uncommitted" work. A clean, safe space for the maybes, the what-ifs, and the half-baked thoughts.
In JPD, you have "Ideas," not "Tickets." This separation is everything. It means your engineering team's backlog stays pristine, filled only with work that has been vetted, prioritized, and is ready to build.
All the messy, creative, non-linear work of discovery—the debates, the research, the evidence-gathering—happens in its own space. Each "Idea" is a container, which you then fill with "Insights" (the customer quotes, data points, and support tickets).
This is the foundation. It acknowledges that discovery is chaotic, and it gives that chaos structure. It's the starting point for letting the ball roll downhill, with gravity, instead of pushing it up. Less force, more momentum. And that's a better way to work.
