Hermance N’dounga is a Senior Product Manager at Atlassian, working on Jira Product Discovery. Speaking at #mtpcon London 2025 in a Spotlight session, she shared the story of how Atlassian learned from its legacy public feature tracker to create a positive customer feedback loop. Watch the video in full, or read on for our recap of the talk.
The problem with public feedback
Hermance opens her talk with a bit of Atlassian history. For years, the company used a public feature request tracker as its main way of collecting customer input. Anyone could submit or upvote requests for Atlassian’s suite of products, from Trello to Confluence to Jira itself.
Hermance notes that users often submitted vague requests with no context, and product managers were left sifting through a flood of feedback, struggling to extract what was meaningful.
The most damning example? A user once celebrated the 15th anniversary of their still-unfulfilled request by baking a birthday cake and posting it to Twitter. “Epic fail,” Hermance adds.
She explains that this feedback system also provided no visibility: once a feature shipped, it disappeared from the list. Users didn’t know what the teams were building, nor why their ideas had seemingly been ignored.
Enter Jira Product Discovery
Hermance then goes on to introduce Jira Product Discovery, Atlassian’s new tool designed specifically for product managers. It was created to tackle the exact problem she’d just outlined—helping product managers centralise feedback, prioritise ideas with criteria, and build shareable, transparent roadmaps.
Hermance notes that Jira Product Discovery has become one of Atlassian’s fastest-growing product. It consistently scores above 82 on customer satisfaction scores, reaching as high as 86. “And we’ve maintained that since launch,” she adds.
She then outlines the five best practices her team adopted to get there—practices that any product team can learn from.
1. Proactively seek feedback
Hermance starts by addressing the common trap many teams fall into: collecting feedback passively, then doing little with it. Instead, her team created multiple channels for structured, intentional input.
She lists four key sources for collating feedback:
- Public community forums (for users and prospects)
- Slack channels (for internal Atlassian teams using the product)
- Enterprise feedback (via account managers)
- In-product feedback forms (so users can comment as they work)
Hermance also mentions the feedback rotation. Every week, one of the four product managers on her team is responsible for reading and responding to every piece of feedback across these channels.
She explains that this practice has several benefits. First, it deepens product understanding—the team are forced to explore unfamiliar parts of the product to respond accurately. Second, it builds team alignment: when feedback is shared week to week, trends quickly emerge. Third, it accelerates discovery. When it’s time to scope a new feature, all the context and insights are already logged.
2. Build for and with a target audience
Next, Hermance turns to how her team validates new ideas. She critiques the traditional persona-based approach, noting that anonymised interviews often fall flat. “Humans don’t work like that,” she says. Instead, her team works directly with a select group of users they call lighthouse users.
She outlines three criteria for selecting lighthouse users:
- They are people of influence and great communicators.
- They’ve experienced the problem deeply and tried to solve it.
- They’re open to new ways of working.
Hermance explains that these users become co-creators, working alongside the team at every step. From early interviews that define the problem, to testing prototypes and helping trim features down into MVPs, lighthouse users are embedded in the process.
She adds that these users also help determine which features are valuable enough to build, and when to stop. “If a milestone has only one piece of feedback logged,” Hermance notes while showing a roadmap screenshot, “I’m not assigning engineers to it. We stop there.”
3. Expand in increments
Building on this, Hermance stresses the importance of scaling gradually. For small features, her team tests with 6–10 lighthouse users. But for bigger areas—like launching an entirely new edition of the product—they look to validate with hundreds.
She outlines how they do this: in-product prompts ask users if they’re willing to test new features; for larger launches, landing pages on Atlassian’s website collect interest. The key is starting focused, then scaling only once the product proves valuable. “Ten is good, but a hundred is better,” she says.
4. Close the loop
One of the biggest changes her team made was ensuring users see the impact of their feedback. Hermance highlights three new practices that help here:
- Internal roadmaps used by account managers to give clear, up-to-date answers.
- Public announcements that go beyond patch notes, often including full articles with space for comments.
- Public roadmap entries that contain everything from early design mocks to Loom videos of shipped features.
Every announcement becomes another opportunity to listen and learn to its users, Hermance notes.
Hermance ends on a high note, returning to the story of the t-shirt-wearing user who went from critic to champion. She reads out the quote they shared:
“I’ve gone from being a Jira hater to being a lover. I keep bragging about this new software—so much that my colleague made this hilarious t-shirt for me.”
Jira Product Discovery is Atlassian’s tool for modern product teams who want to go beyond the backlog and build with confidence. Capture feedback from across your org, prioritise what matters, and bring your team—and your customers—along for the journey.
