Not Every Idea Belongs in Jira (Yet)

If you’ve worked as a Product Manager for more than a week, you’ve probably heard someone say, “Just put it in Jira.” Whether it’s a half-baked feature request, a passing thought from a stakeholder, or a vague user complaint—it somehow ends up as a ticket. And before you know it, Jira’s backlog becomes a graveyard of unloved, unrefined ideas.

Let’s be clear: Jira is a phenomenal tool. I’m a huge advocate for it. It’s powerful, flexible, and great at managing structured work. In fact, in a previous role, I even set up a dedicated Jira project just for product idea intake. We had our own backlog, our own swimlanes, and it gave us a way to keep product thinking organized.

But here's the truth: even that setup had its limits.

The Limits of Using Jira for Early-Stage Ideas

In theory, that dedicated Jira project helped us track ideas before they were ready for the dev team. But in practice, it still only really worked once we’d already decided an idea should move forward.

The process required a lot of overhead:

• Before moving a ticket to the development backlog, it had to be fully validated and scoped
• Designs had to be completed first, which often meant creating duplicate tickets in a separate design board
• The only connection between those tickets was a "linked to" relationship, which didn’t surface well in our day-to-day view

We couldn’t easily tell whether a design was ready, still under review, or blocked. And trying to manage that kind of status communication across disconnected Jira boards became… messy.

Jira Is for Execution. You Need a Tool for Exploration.

Jira shines at what it’s designed for: execution, delivery, and sprint planning. But when it comes to exploring early-stage product ideas, it can become a bottleneck.

Trying to use Jira as your thinking space can lead to:

• Overloaded backlogs full of vague or half-formed ideas
• Poor visibility into upstream work like design or research
• Wasted time maintaining and syncing multiple boards
• Frustrated teams trying to align across silos

Why I Built Produmo

Product Managers need a dedicated space for idea management—one that connects exploration, validation, and collaboration across teams before the dev sprint begins.

Produmo was born out of that need.

It helps PMs:

• Capture raw ideas from any channel
• Collaborate with stakeholders, designers, data analysts, and researchers in one place
• Track the real status of upstream work like design or research
• Decide when an idea is actually ready to become a Jira ticket

No more duplicate tickets. No more “Is this ready?” Slack messages. No more guessing what's in review or blocked.

A Better Workflow for Product Teams

Here’s the ideal flow:

• Capture and explore ideas in Produmo
• Collaborate with other teams to validate and enrich the idea
• Tag against goals, metrics, and effort
• Push to Jira only when it’s dev-ready

This keeps Jira clean, focused, and efficient—while giving early-stage ideas the structured attention they deserve.

Final Thoughts

Jira is amazing at what it does. But it was never designed to be your thinking space.

By separating your product idea workflow from your delivery tool, you’ll reduce noise, improve cross-team communication, and focus on building what actually matters.