I would like to use personas in Jira Product Discovery (JPD). Although it doesn't have a Personas feature, and Jira persona plugins don't work with JPD.
I heavily use personas to represent the user types which are relevant to product ideas and features. They help executives, the discovery team as well as delivery stakeholders to quickly grasp the goals, behaviors and pain points of our target audience. Adding Personas as a core feature to Jira Product Discovery would allow associating ideas directly with them and use them in critical discovery artifacts like user stories and customer journey maps.
The value I see includes:
- Laser sharp user focus - Having personas front and center keeps the team laser focused on capturing real user needs rather than floating ideas in a vacuum. Embedding personas into JPD ensures the entire product discovery team is aligned on who the stakeholders features are and why. This becomes a source of truth that new team members can quickly get up to speed on.
- Feature prioritization - When evaluating new features or changes, the team can assess how well it maps to solving problems for their target persona types. This objective criteria drives better prioritization.
- Customer empathy - Fleshing out personas with real user research like interviews builds empathy and an emotional connection to the customers, which inspires better match of discovery ideas to the real world. I consider it a critical contextual layer that's currently missing from Jira Product Discovery to make more informed product decisions, build the right features, and deliver better experiences.
This is my current workaround implementation:
1. Associated Jira SW project - I have a separate Jira SW project to help me do this. It simply exists to host a Persona plugin which is great to create personas
2. Associated Confluence space - I have an associated Confluence space where I link personas (screenshot JPG) to ideas, e.g. via a journey map (Confluence Journey Map template) with the ideas embedded as hyperlink-based idea issue cards on the Confluence page.
3. Persona field in JPD - I have a persona custom multi-select field to associate an idea with a persona
That's quite a cumbersome and lean way to do it though. Would be great to have at least the same functionality that is available in "normal" Jira projects, i.e.:
- Persona definition - a dedicated way to capture personas, available via an app, or better in-built since they're such an essential part of discovery
- Persona link - a dedicated way associate an issue with a persona, or multiple personas, which is not just a "label", e.g. a Persona field as a rich link to the persona definition and characteristics like tech savviness, early adopters etc., importance to my org etc.
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