Adding links to Ideas

Adding any link to Ideas

You can use the text editor anywhere in ProdPad to  insert links. In Ideas, you can also add an external link to clearly signpost external resources. This is a useful way to add context and information to your Idea. Click the + Add link button at the top of an Idea to add a link. 

Connecting Ideas with your delivery tools

ProdPad is designed so your product processes sit upstream from delivery. ProdPad connects with a wide variety of development integrations - including Jira and Azure DevOps - which you can configure to your team's specific needs. After setting up an integration, you have the option to push the Idea to your development tool, via the Push to development button. Doing this will create a new ticket in your dev tool using the information in the Idea. 

However, there may be occasions when you want to associate an existing ticket in your dev tool with an Idea. So instead of pushing from ProdPad to development to create a new ticket, you can add and integrate an external link. By adding an associated integration, as the existing ticket moves through different stages in the dev tool, the stages will reflect in the Idea Workflow.

Linking an Idea to an Associated integration

To connect an Idea to an existing ticket, click on the  + Add link button, and fill in the required fields, using the URL of the ticket. Use the drop-down menu to select the integration the link belongs to. Please note - you will only be able to select integrations that have already been set up. Connecting a link with associated integration is only available for: 

• Jira
• Azure DevOps
• Github

External URLs and IDs

Every external issue/work item type has a unique ID and URL which is needed to allow the integrations to sync. If you push the Idea from ProdPad this is set up automatically, but if you want to map issues/items already in your delivery tool you will need to add the external URL and ID.

• Jira
The URL to add in ProdPad will be the Jira Issue URL

To find the issue/external ID in JIRA, for a specific issue - Open the issue, find the  ‘...’ option and select Export XML

The id you are looking for is under <item> below the tags for title and description - you will want the ID value in the Key tag rather than the key value.
For multiple issues you can find these via advanced search, and exporting to csv. You will find the issue ID in the corresponding column. (If you are importing from the CSV you can map the fields to External ID when mapping an external URL and Title)

Alternatively, Jira recommend the following method - https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-get-issue-id-from-the-jira-user-interface-1115156394.html

• Azure DevOps

The external URL to add in ProdPad is the work item URL. The external ID for the Azure DevOps work item is the Work Item ID



• Github

The external URL is the issue URL and issue number is the number at the end of the URL

Use cases for linking an Idea to an Associated integration

• Team Nimble has been using JIRA for all their product and backlog management. As they start using ProdPad and creating Ideas, they realise that Idea 263 ('Would social logins increase user adoption?") relates to a Jira ticket ('Enable Twitter SSO') that has already been scoped. Rather than push Idea 263 to development and duplicate the work, they add a link to the existing Jira ticket and uses the Associated integration to connect the two. Now as the dev team work on the Twitter SSO feature, Idea 263's workflow status will automatically update as the ticket's status changes in Jira. This means that when Twitter SSO launches, the product team can track its impact on user adoption, and update Idea 263 accordingly.  
• Product Manager Charlotte has a customer feedback portal set up. She's been linking feedback about a beta feature, Idea 1855 ('Customizable colour schemes'), to the Idea to keep track of users' thoughts. She realises that a lot of the feedback is about the colour blue missing from the options, which has already been logged as a bug in ADO. Charlotte adds a link to the ADO to Idea 1855, and connects the two using the Associated integration. Now Charlotte can easily track the progress of the bug from ProdPad, and update the customer who gave feedback.