Is product area best way to organize many ideas?
Asked by David:

We have hundreds of ideas and I'm looking for the best way to categorize ideas that are related. Is the product area meant for this, or is there a better way to do this? The key is being able to easy find or group ideas that are similiar.

Thanks


Answers:
author: James Doyle
body: It may/may not work for you but when I was setting up our product discovery projects I configured a number of different options under the product area field.

This way when we wish to use the group by, we can group by product areas, this works well for us. But guess depends on your idea backlog and whether you can configure in the same way.

Regards, James.

comments: author: David
body: Thanks James. I think I'm going to give it a try and use it as a way to categorize our ideas.


author: Tanguy Crusson
body: [@David](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3682781) The way we've designed Jira Product Discovery is so you can slice and dice the data in the ways that match how you think about your product. All based on custom views and fields that we tried to make as easy as possible to create and change.

Here are a few demos from the FAQ that should help you understand the approach:

#### We have multiple products and teams. Should we use one project or multiple? {#toc-hId-179644801}

This depends on many factors. Jira Product Discovery was designed to work best when used by individual teams using the Spotify squad model. But it's possible to use a single project to share between teams/products, especially when there's a high level of collaboration required between these teams.

[Demo: using a single project for multiple products and teams](https://www.loom.com/share/86e2e955f6af4982961fffc2deee8e20)

**There's no hierarchical view of ideas. How can we organize a large list of ideas?**

Instead of a hierarchical view you can make use of the flexible views and fields structure to visualize your ideas based on a number of dimensions. You can create a separate field per dimension that you want to use to categorize ideas, and then use them in different views using grouping and filtering.

[Demo: using fields and views to organize a large list of ideas](https://www.loom.com/share/7f3cab4d5de748088533298f24b8b171)

#### Can we create different issue types and their relationships? (e.g. parent/child or opportunity/solution) {#toc-hId--1627809662}

Not yet, but it's on the roadmap. In the meantime you can use the flexible fields and views system to do this. Here is an example:

[Demo: grouping solutions by opportunities](https://www.loom.com/share/c5acafb1584740c98f6871667bac6df8). And here's a [recording for how to reproduce this configuration](https://www.loom.com/share/c74c8cc8e5be4daaa4498bb8d3397bcd)


author: John Sayers
body: Hi David,

We use the Product Area and some additional custom fields we added to facilitate the different ways we want to slice and dice out data.

We have Product Area, Business Capability (Stability, Scale, Simplification, Enhanced Capabilities etc.), Business Function (Risk, Finance, Investments, HR, etc.), Goals (yes, we have goals as a list and assign goals to our ideas e.g., 2022 Improve Platform Stability, 2023 System Consolidation, 2023 Risk Insights), Teams etc.

This way can enter Effort/Impact (or you could think of impact as "value") for all our ideas and then rank them against each other on the Effort/Value matrix, using filters to just see for a single product, or Business Function, etc.

The low effort high impact you are going to do, quick wins/low hanging fruit. High effort high value usually (but not always) big strategic pieces of work you will likely do.

It's the bottom half of the Effort/Value matrix where you start to think about doing or not, low effort low value (maybe) high effort low value (almost never).

Hope that helps.

John.


author: Jan-Hendrik Spieth
body: The key is to understand in what way your ideas are typically related and/or what keeps them apart.

And of course, you need to find out what you actually need to drill into your idea set effectively and efficiently, when the time comes (some disovery panel/meeting or so?). This may depend very much on the stakeholders that are involved and their personal habits/likings.

JPD then gives you very flexible options, so that you can set up one or more select and/or multi-select fields segmenting your project's "domain"

Think features, think content, ... - whatever suits your needs!

"Product area" certainly worked well for us for starters. Additionally, we are also using a field to express which products related to the ideas. Beyond that, it's not yet quite clear whether we will use tags for more detailed segments, or have sth similar to "product area", but with (a lot) more options.