Connecting Ideas toProduct Management

[clangmayr]

Hi there, we are currently working on a project to speed up and revamp our product management. I would be highly interested in experiences of those who use Ideas in Khoros and link it to an internal product management process. Are they linked directly e.g. to Jiira or other tools. Or are you treating them as seperate entyties.

Thanks for your support

Christian

[Wendy_S]

I think I heard someone talking about connecting Ideas with Jira but I am not sure where I heard this. I must think about that. My mind is still in vacation mode as I just returned from 3 weeks off 😃

Anyhow. You could always start with a manual integration and use Jira or Trello to put ideas in. We're thinking about doing something similar internally as we harvest ideas from our users/experts in the private board. This is a way to track, prioritize and work on the feedback as it gets shared. It so often gets buried into the board.

[StanGromer]

Hah, I just asked Khoros for any examples of anyone they know doing this good a few weeks ago as well. This seems to be a gap for nearly every company out there.

We live in Community/Ideas.  Product lives in JIRA.  The two don't integrate together in any way. We've put in some manual processes where we utilize our own software as the middle-man of sorts, but it's still not something our product team is actively engaged in. We're actively trying to get them more engaged/more involved.

The root issue is time - Nobody on their team has the time to actively jump onto an Idea Exchange.  Our team isn't smart enough about our product to do it ourselves. So we're stuck in this trap of the more ideas that get submitted, the deeper in the hole we get, and harder to ever overcome the larger issue seems to become... While I just sit here watching it unfold as a neutral third party trying to help improve the entire experience 😞

[Wendy_S]

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/insided-media_product-customersuccess-csm-activity-669924005910050816...

Insided seems to have some form of integration.

But, is the problem the tool, or the resources and time?
Could you use teams and workflow in teams instead for example?

[clangmayr]

Well, as above stated this is exactly the gap. If we have the customers and their wishes and ideas on one end and the product and devlopment on the other end in a seperate world we create a gap. PM has decided to add a third party in between that could manage ideation and product management workflows. but that would take it out of the community and limit it to customers only. Again creating an unneccessary gap and audience split. Hoping to get some easier work around. The tool they are using will be AHA!. So we either need some links.

Lets see what else comes up.

[JasonHill]

@StanGromer Your experience sounds exactly like where I was at my previous organisation. It was very difficult. I've since thought that an Idea Exchange is a very public window into the organisation and takes a very firm commitment from the entire organisation to be successful. All the best with getting the team onboard. 

Jason

[mhock]

Our team is considering AHA as well.  We struggle with time and tool.  Plan is to link AHA to the existing Ideas so we seamlessly (easier typed than launched) move the user to a AHA.  Khoros does many things well but for our idea volume, we need a system the focuses on feature requests. 

Our BI team has had some success using the Khoros API to get some meaningful reports into Tableau. 

[clangmayr]

Hi there, this is interesting. Does this mean you will 'replace' the Khoros Ideation with AHA! or put it 'behind' the scences as in collecting the ideas in Khoros and the filter-qualify and move them to AHA! At Exasol we also have mostly Feature requests by our customers but would need also a bit broader input. May be we can DM here about this in more details. Khoros to Tableau (or dump in a DB) is also interesting. Christian

[clangmayr]

Working in a Tech Company in IT I know what you are talking about... some of the Ideas are PhD level and way above my head in that field. The question is how to keep the User in the community and make the access to the ideas (in whatever tool) seamless.
e.g. move a question from a discussion board to a Idea to a TKB and reverse...

[mhock]

We are actually planning on a click into ideas to take you directly to AHA. This will eliminate it from a full community search.  That said, we hope to have a federated search in the future.

Happy to connect to talk.  Feel free to DM.

[VarunGrazitti]

@clangmayr  - The fix here would be to have a Khoros JIRA connector and have the ideas sync and flow.

Feel free to DM.

[GlennD]

Add me to the list. Our Prod teams are adopting Aha! just as I was getting them onboard with Ideas in the community. Being able to sync Ideas with Aha! would be a huge win, other wise I will most likely end up retiring the Ideas boards in the community and just link to the Aha! boards once they are rolled out. My team is small and doesn't have the time to manually import and update from one to the other.

[clangmayr]

Hi, we now have settled for the following procedure.
Ideation stays (starts) in Khoros until we reach the accepted status. Product Management supervises the boards and asks the neccessary questions. As soon as we reach accepted. The ideas are moved to Aha! manually at the moment.

Why?

- the community has the Usermanagement in place to determine who should have access and viability

- the community team oversees the moderation of the Board. Avoiding Spam and Trolling.

- Aha! does not have to implement userstructures and is kept clean to 'just' do Product development.

- we are working on an Export/Import to Aha! Aha has an API so that should be doable when Ideas reach a certain stage.

Hope that helps

Christian

[GlennD]

@clangmayr Thanks for reporting back. This seems like a compromise for the time being. 

[karolinalinda]

We were researching the integration with Jira and there is a plugin implemented by Atlassian. We haven't tested it though.

In the legacy community platform, we we're using hidden comments to paste links to Jira (and vice versa - PMs were adding links to ideas in Jira). The comment visibility was set for the PM team only, so external users didn't see Jira links. It would be great to have this conditional comment visibility in Khoros as well - it wasn't perfect, but at least something 😉

[clangmayr]

Hi Karolina,
could you please point me to the Plugin, we are changing another part in the system and that could be gold for the implementation.

Thanks

Christian

[karolinalinda]

If I remember correctly, this is what we were looking at: https://community.developer.atlassian.com/t/atlassian-community-integration-with-jsd/8153 

[EmDunn]

We currently have our Aha! Ideas board embedded in an iFrame. It's not an ideal experience for many reasons.

Has anyone been able to integrate Khoros Ideas with Aha?