Jira Product Discovery project support in Cycle Time charts

Jira Product Discovery is a dedicated Atlassian product designed for product teams to track and manage discovery, marketing, and similar activities. Additionally, it can be utilized to support scaled agile frameworks by introducing entities above the Epic level. Regardless of the use case, the nature of that type of work is flow-based, making metrics like cycle time and time in status essential for measuring and improving processes.

Since this version, you can measure these cycles and time spent in different statuses for the specific “idea” issue type and Product Discovery (PD) projects. This is possible even though these are not explicitly listed among all issue types and Jira projects (due to Atlassian internal limitations). To enable this, you can use the following workarounds:

Status groups

Every flow has two modes: work in progress and waiting. Therefore, the need to measure them separately is evident. Starting with this version, you can define which statuses to count as waiting, implying that all other statuses will be considered as in progress:

You can configure each group according to your needs and use them as items for comparison:

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The Ratio view in the Time in Status chart

You can visually compare status segments by their colors on stacked bars, but spotting the trend of their relative proportions can be challenging. That’s why we introduced a new view for the Time in Status chart called “Ratio,” which allows you to see how the proportion between selected statuses changes over time:

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Understanding the proportion of time spent in each status or group helps evaluate the process and develop a strategy to maintain or improve it. For instance, you can define a healthy ratio between in-progress and waiting groups, then review the issue list to identify which issues deviate from this ratio and require attention:

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The Average per Issue view in the Time in Status chart

When setting a healthy benchmark or an objective for improving the working process, it's beneficial to use a tangible indicator at a micro level, where day-to-day work happens. For example, the team might agree that high-priority work should wait no longer than one day. To monitor this agreement, you can use the average view of the Time in Status chart:

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The chart displays the arithmetic average by default, which means outliers can skew the data. For more statistically accurate measurements, we recommend using the "median, 50%" and other percentiles:

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Target lines in Time in Status chart

It can often be challenging to determine whether a specific number of days or hours is a good or bad indicator of process health. It feels more natural to assess the dynamics when you make changes or experiment with your process, observing how your metrics move against a benchmark. To support this, we’ve added targets to all views of the Time in Status chart:

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