How to easily visualise team hierarchies in Atlassian

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Community 👋

We’re excited to announce a major update for Atlassian Teams: Team Hierarchy is gradually rolling out to all customers. It helps you mirror your org structure, manage parent and sub-team relationships, and navigate teams at scale.

✨ What’s new?

• Browse and search the Teams Directory in a new list view: See your entire team hierarchy at a glance, with nested teams and expandable sub teams, and quickly find any team to view its relationships and place within the directory for easier navigation and discovery.

• View parent and sub-team relationships on every team’s profile: Understand how teams fit together, from departments to squads and sub-teams.

• Update team hierarchy directly from the team profile: With the right permissions, you can add or modify parent and sub teams to accurately reflect your organisation’s structure.

🛠️ How to get started

Add parents or sub-teams: From a team profile, select “Add a parent or sub team,” pick the team, and save.

Explore your org in the directory: Switch to list view and expand/collapse teams to see relationships.

See a team’s place in the hierarchy: Open the team profile to view its hierarchy and breadcrumbs, or search in the directory to view context.

🧠 Coming soon

We are currently exploring options for syncing team hierarchies from external sources such as HRIS systems (e.g. Workday).

💬 Tell us what you think

Try out Team Hierarchy and drop your questions and feedback in the comments. We’d love to hear how your teams use it.

[Darryl Lee]

WHOOPS, MY BAD!

I got totally confused.

For some reason I thought this was the somehow incorporating Reporting Lines (which is like organizational hierarchy) into Teams.

Reporting lines (basically your Org Chart based on your Manager) are described here:

Get an accurate view of your org's work - You can now filter projects and goals by Reporting lines 

But NOPE!

And we still can't sync Manager, but enh, that has nothing to do with this feature.

I will say that for companies that already have Nested Groups (using Azure AD for Nested Groups), and give users the ability to create and nest their own groups, Teams doesn't really add any functionality. 

I am encouraged that Atlassian eventually realized that large companies (those Enterprises that they are courting) probably already have existing group mechanisms in their IdPs, and so they introduced SCIM-synced Teams that allow connecting IdP groups with Teams.

But yeah, it would've been nice if they thought of that before pushing Teams upon us without letting Admins control it.

---

Ohey, this sounds neat. But we can't use it.

Any chance you'll figure out a way to sync Manager for organizations that are using Azure AD for Nested Groups (Microsoft Graph) to provision users? 

The problem is when using Azure AD for Nested Groups, we don't have the ability to create a custom mapping, as described here:

How to sync the manager attribute into Atlassian Home with Azure AD 

Looking at our Azure AD data (through the AADS gateway), I believe our "manager" field includes the DN for my manager, so:

manager: CN=MY MANAGER,OU=AADDC Users,DC=ldap,DC=MYORG,DC=com

So yeah, we'd probably have to do some kind of mapping. 

OR... I guess I can wait for you to support import from Workday.

[Cornelia Jeppsson]

This is cool, how will it work for filters - if I filter on tickets tagged with a parent team, will that filter then also include work items tagged with any of the sub-teams? Or is this purely "visual" at this point e.g. you can see in the teams page that the structure is like that but it has no effect otherwise? It's a nice addition, either way!

[Chris]

Please stop adding new features and start fixing open bug reports:

• [JRACLOUD-95266] Add support for membersOf JQL function for Teams - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products.
• allow to use the same Team in production and sandbox environment
• add team field to automations (and not by using JSON code)
• https://jira.atlassian.com/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20JRACLOUD%20AND%20component%20%3D%20%22Teams%20-%20People%20and%20Teams%22%20ORDER%20BY%20votes%20DESC

[Jared Schmitt]

Hi @Pauline Heng 

This will be a great feature appreciated by many - if done right.

Unfortunately I'm missing a lot of infos from your post org admins are keen to know:

1. When will this feature land?
2. Will it follow the usual release tracks?
3. Who can modify a team hierarchy?
4. How are permissions to modify team hierarchy managed?
5. Will there be an API that allows us to manage team hierarchies programmatically? Including all CRUDE operations at least.
6. Will this new feature also introduce a "Manager" attribute/role for each team?

I might have additional questions, but that's it for now :) 

[Michiel Schuijer]

Excellent improvements. I am surprised, and would like to stress the importance, of not being able to sort the teams by name, at the very least.

Edit: Oh, and please have the teams display in "List mode" by default, instead of the grid which doesn't show the (new) hierarchy, or let people save such view options for themselves and the organisation.

Do keep improving, don't stop now ;) 

[James Rickards _SN_]

In my experience, being able to replicate the hierarchy of nested Office365 groups in Azure Entra (formally AD) would have far wider appeal than Work Day.

But as you don't support nested groups for SCIM in Atlassian Guard (last time I checked) so I would not expect support for it in the Teams feature.

[Darryl Lee]

@James Rickards _SN_ --

I 100% agree that syncing nested Azure Entra groups is super-useful.

It's why we went to the extra work of switching from SCIM to Azure AD for Nested Groups, which uses Microsoft Graph to provision users.

And with the introduction of SCIM-synced Teams you can now sync specific Entra groups to Atlassian Teams.

[Pauline Heng]

Hey @Jared Schmitt, thanks for all your questions. 

1. When will this feature land?

   • We’ve been gradually rolling this feature out over the past week, and it should now be available to all customers. If you still don’t see it on your site, please reach out and we’ll take a look.

2. Will it follow the usual release tracks?

   • Not yet. We’re currently exploring how to include Teams features in release tracks in the near future, but we don’t have specific timelines to share yet.

3. Who can modify a team hierarchy?

   • Only users with edit rights can modify a team’s hierarchy, so that means:

     • Org admins can modify hierarchies, and

     • For member‑managed teams, team members can modify the hierarchy.

   • We’re also looking at introducing more admin controls for verified teams (which are managed only by org admins), so it’s worth keeping an eye on future community updates.

4. How are permissions to modify team hierarchy managed?

   • Right now, permissions are aligned with the existing membership control options for each team. In other words, whoever can edit the team based on its membership settings can also modify its hierarchy.

5. Will there be an API that allows us to manage team hierarchies programmatically? Including all CRUD operations at least.

   • You can access this via GQL today. Parent information is available on the TeamV2 GraphQL entity, which you can use to manage and query team hierarchy relationships programmatically.

6. Will this new feature also introduce a “Manager” attribute/role for each team?

   • Not at the moment. We know this is a common request and we’re actively exploring options right now, and our hope is to offer this capability sometime next year.

[Pauline Heng]

Thanks for taking the time to share this and for linking the bug reports @Chris I understand it can be frustrating to see new features while long‑standing requests are still open.

On your specific questions, membersOf() JQL for Teams and using the Team field directly in Automation are areas the team is actively working on right now. We hope to solve these problems in the first quarter of the new year. Please continue to keep an eye on the JAC ticket status and our community posts for updates.

For using the same Team in production and sandbox: both production sites and sandbox sites do use the same copy of a team. Could you please share more details so we can dig into it?

[Pauline Heng]

Hey @Cornelia Jeppsson, thanks so much for the feedback on how this could work with filters. You’re right that it is purely visual at this point, and we do have plans to support filtering in the future, but the timing is still to be confirmed 🙏.

[Pauline Heng]

Thanks for taking the time to share this @Michiel Schuijer. I understand how useful sorting would be. I've looked into this and right now we’re not able to support it due to some technical constraints, but I’ve added this to our backlog. Once those constraints are resolved (likely sometime next year), we’ll look at enabling sorting.

[Pauline Heng]

Appreciate you calling this out @James Rickards _SN_. We know nested Entra / O365 groups are important for many customers, and while we don’t support this in Teams today yet, we’ll keep your use case in mind as we plan future improvements 🙏🙏.

[Pauline Heng]

Thanks so much for sharing this, @Darryl Lee - totally agree that manager information not syncing into Teams is a gap today. We’re exploring a more flexible ‘fields’ approach for Teams next year, with the intent that data like manager (and similar attributes) could eventually be synced from HRIS into those fields. Timelines are still to be confirmed, but that’s the direction we’re heading.

On the Azure AD / SCIM side, we don’t have manager‑sync on the near‑term roadmap yet. We’re currently focusing first on HRIS/Workday, and then we’ll look at how we can better support manager mapping for SCIM and Azure AD scenarios like yours.