Making blocked issues easier to spot on Jira boards

[#1]

One Jira pain point keeps resurfacing in the Atlassian Community:

How do you know an issue is blocked without opening it?

It's not a new question either. Community members have been asking for years how to make blocked or linked issues more visible directly on Jira boards:

• Can I add blocked or linked tickets to a board card? The answer today is that you can display the Linked Issues field, but it doesn't clearly indicate whether the issue is actually blocked, and team-managed projects have additional limitations.

• How do I visualize blocked issues? Multiple discussions end up relying on JQL, automation, or Marketplace apps because Jira doesn't provide a simple native way to surface active blockers on the board.

After reading those discussions and running into the same problem on my own teams, I realized something.

Most solutions answer one of these questions:

• How do I query blocked issues?

• How do I model blocked work in my workflow?

But very few answer the question people ask dozens of times every day while planning work:

"Can I tell this issue is blocked just by looking at my board?"

The usual approaches

I've tried most of the common workarounds:

• Create a JQL filter.

• Introduce a dedicated Blocked status.

• Flag blocked issues.

• Build automation to synchronize labels or custom fields.

They're all valid approaches, but each has trade-offs.

A JQL filter is useful for reporting, but not everyone on the team wants to think in JQL.

A dedicated Blocked status introduces another workflow state, and once the blocker is removed, someone has to decide which status the issue should return to.

Flags are quick to add, but over time they often end up representing many different kinds of attention, making it harder to distinguish genuine blockers.

What we built

We took a slightly different approach.

StatusClock's Attention Engine monitors issue links and automatically identifies when an issue has an active blocker.

Instead of changing the workflow or adding another status, it marks the issue as Immediate Attention.

Because it's a standard custom field, you can add it directly to your Jira card layout, alongside fields like Assignee, Priority, or Story Points.

The goal wasn't to replace existing workflows.

It was simply to make blocked work easier to notice where teams already spend their time: the board.

I'd genuinely love feedback from people who've run into this problem before.

Would this fit your team's workflow? Are there edge cases you'd want it to handle, such as multiple blockers, custom link types, or dependency chains?

Happy to discuss.

Disclosure: I'm the developer of StatusClock, an Atlassian Marketplace app.

[MeghnaP_LogicLemur Labs]

Curious how other teams handle blocked work today.

Do you use:

• Flags?
• A dedicated "Blocked" status?
• JQL filters?
• Automation?

I'd love to learn what has worked (or hasn't) for your team.

[Anwesha Pan]

Good to know about this feature! Thanks for sharing :) @MeghnaP_LogicLemur Labs