Introducing team types: manage teams at scale with control and flexibility

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Community 👋

We’re excited to introduce a new way to organise your teams: Team Types! This feature makes it easier and safer to organise, govern, and scale teams across your company. See how team types work.

✨ What’s new?

We’ve listened to your feedback and made it easier to organise your teams in Atlassian by introducing two simple team types:

• Official team (previously called “managed team”):

  • For your company’s official, recognised teams - like departments or business units. These are typically set up by your admins or synced from your HR system, and are marked with a blue checkmark for trust. Now, you can also create trusted “Official teams” directly, without needing to sync with other systems.

• Team:

  • For any group that wants to collaborate or start something new spontaneously. These are flexible and open for anyone to create and join.

This update makes it easy to see which teams are official and which are flexible, so you can organise and scale your teams with confidence, ensuring the right teams are used for governance and reporting.

Customising team types

Every organisation works differently. With custom team types, you can organise your teams in a way that matches your unique structure and ways of working, whether that’s based on frameworks, departments, projects or any other model your company follows. These team types work just like Official teams: they’re managed only by admins and are marked with a blue checkmark to show they are admin approved.

Custom team types help you organise teams clearly, support your preferred ways of working, and prepare for more controls and settings coming soon.

🛠️ How to use team types?

Every team must have a team type. Team types are designed to ensure that, as we introduce more settings, permissions, and controls in the future, each team will have the right configuration. While these advanced controls aren’t available from day one, team types lay the foundation for easier, more consistent team management across your organisation, eliminating repetitive manual updates.

When a team is created, it will always be assigned to a team type - either one of the default types or a custom type set by your admins.

You can use Team Types in three ways:

In Teams App settings:

• Only admins can update existing team types.

• Only admins can create new custom team types. All custom team types are admin-managed (not open/member-managed) and are marked with a blue checkmark.

• Only the default “Team” type is open/member-managed; you cannot create new open/member-managed types.

When making a new team:

• Anyone can make a new team.

• Only admins can choose which team type to assign to the new team.

• Non-admins can only create teams that are automatically assigned to the default “Team” type (open/member-managed).

On a team’s profile:

• Only admins can change a team’s type.

• Non-admins can view the team type but cannot make changes.

🙋 FAQ

1. Why use team types?

   • Team types make it clear which teams are official (admin-managed and used for reporting) and which are flexible (open for quick collaboration), so you can organise work and reporting with confidence.

2. What changes for regular users?

   • You’ll see a blue checkmark on team types created and managed by admins.

   • Everything else works the same as before.

3. Can I change a team’s type later?

   • Yes! If you’re an admin, you can switch between team types anytime.

4. Will changing the type affect who can join or manage the team?

   • Yes, but only if you change a team from an admin-managed type (like “Official team” or a custom type) to the default “Team” type, which is open/member-managed. Only the default “Team” type is open/member-managed; all other types are admin-managed.

📚 Reference documents

Below are a few helpful resources if you’d like to dive deeper into how team types work, how to connect them to groups or HR systems, and how to get started using them in your organisation.

• Understanding member-managed team types:

  • Team types and configuration

  • Create and manage an Atlassian team
    

• Understanding admin-managed team types (or Official teams):

  • Understanding verification for teams
  • Sync team members with a local Atlassian group
  • Sync teams data from Workday
  • Sync team members with SCIM user provisioning

💬 Tell us what you think

Try out Team Types and comment below with your feedback or ideas. Thanks for helping us make Teams better for everyone!

[Israel]

Lovely article, thanks for the new features.

I find myself using the Team platform app more and more. 

The latest use case I discovered is in Jira Plans timeline settings, Color by Teams. This way I can see the same work item highlighted by different colours depending on the Team working on it.

[Jared Schmitt]

Hi @Pauline Heng 

Is there any chance we get a system setting controlling whether

Anyone can make a new team.

is an option for our user base or not? Currently admins need to clean up the mess users leave behind when spinning up these teams and the forgetting about them 3 days later.

Alternatively these teams could have a form of expiry: If not actively used for X days across Atlassian apps, the team gets archived/removed automatically. 

[Yatish Madhav]

Nice - thanks @Pauline Heng - almost seems like this is going to snowball into something big. Looking forward to the advanced configurations. 

I also wonder what is going to happen to groups if teams is "the next big thing"? I ask because it seems with official teams, it is a 1 to 1 link and makes sense to be able to manage 1 thing (even though I know the differences between the 2) - Is groups going to change in the long term?

Also, ditto to @Jared Schmitt question and suggestion

Thank you, Yatish

[Josh]

This is great. Thank you, @Pauline Heng !

Would it be possible to filter the Teams list by Team Type?

Also, could Team Type be added as a Columns option?

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Pauline Heng 

Thanks for this information, and...

You described this: "Team types are designed to ensure that, as we introduce more settings, permissions, and controls in the future, each team will have the right configuration."  What can you share about how types will impact team selection in features such as Jira Plans, filtering by team type, etc.?

Regarding the public REST API endpoints:

• Will the team types be available with the endpoints?
• Will the team types be available as smart values in automation rules?

Kind regards,
Bill

[JD Smith]

Does this mean contexts for the Team field or Team-type custom fields are coming? Having unofficial and official teams mixed together in the same field makes "official" not that useful, and it's hard to see the utility of team types for the same reason

[Curt Holley]

This is cool, but i'd rather see key functionality enabled for the Team field like;

• Being able to select it and see the team values directly within the Edit work item action or a new Edit Team action in Automation
• Being able to hide the Team field with a default on JSM request types, to achieve known initial triage without the need for automation
• Being able to filter a Team field (yes, let's have custom Team fields with filtering) by type, so that only Support teams can be seen/selected within JSM work items. This one may well be possible in the future thanks to this Team Type concept, so Yay!!
  • Stretch objective: Set up a custom team field the right way and then when custom team field is populated, only members of that team can be selected in the Assignee field

I'm sure there is more, but that will do for now.

[James Rickards _SN_]

Nice simple quality of life improvement.

+1 vote for the idea to capture an expiry date for unmanaged teams and automating the process checking in with the creator and archiving abandoned teams.

[Pauline Heng]

Thanks so much for sharing this @Israel! It’s great to hear you’re using the Teams app more and more. The color by team view in Jira Plans is a really nice use case, and we hope to keep making Teams even more useful for scenarios like this over time. 🙌

[Pauline Heng]

Thanks for raising this @Jared Schmitt. We hear similar feedback from other admins as well. Right now, anyone can still create a new team. However, only admins can decide which teams are marked as “Official” (and any other custom team types you set up). The idea behind team types is to help you distinguish verified, approved teams from more ad‑hoc ones, so users can still collaborate freely while admins keep control over what’s considered “official.”

On the cleanup side, we’re actively exploring options to make this easier, including things like bulk archiving and deleting teams, and using Automation or Rovo to help identify and act on inactive teams. Your feedback and suggestion is really helpful in shaping how we think of our solutions. Tagging @James Rickards _SN_ for upvoting this idea too.

[Pauline Heng]

Thanks @Yatish Madhav, we’re also excited about where this can go! 😃

We’re currently still exploring more configurations to make managing of teams at scale easier for everyone.

A team can only belong in one team type at a given time, however admins have the flexibility to reassign a team to another type of their choice.

For groups specifically, our plan is for them to be a type of a team and we’re still working through the specific details.

[Pauline Heng]

@Josh Yes! We are working on adding the ability to search and filter teams by team type in the Teams list in the next quarter.

I’ve also noted your suggestion to add “Team type” as a column, it is definitely on our radar as we refine the Teams list 👍

[Pauline Heng]

Hi @Bill Sheboy, thanks for your questions.

Today, team types don’t change how teams work in Jira Plans. In the future, we’re exploring ways to use team types to control which teams can be selected in specific Jira Plans and to enable filtering by type. For example, only showing certain types like “Feature” or “Official” teams in a given Jira plan.

Team types are already available to query via our TeamV2 GraphQL API, but aren’t available as smart values in Automation yet, but I’ve added your request to our backlog so we can consider it as we consider it as we expand automation support for Teams.

This kind of feedback really helps us decide where to invest next, so thank you for taking the time to ask.

[Pauline Heng]

Hi @JD Smith, you’re right that official and unofficial teams currently appear together in the same field, which can make the “official” designation less impactful. Team types are our first step toward addressing this so that, over time, you’ll be able to control where different types of teams appear, such as in specific fields, contexts, or views.

While we don’t yet support contexts for the Team field or team-type-based custom fields, this is the direction we’re heading, which is giving admins more control over which teams show up where, so “verified and admin-approved” teams can be treated differently from ad-hoc ones. Your feedback aligns with our goals, and we’re actively exploring options for customising type-level team fields.

[Pauline Heng]

Hey @Curt Holley, thanks for your suggestions!

We’re currently working on enabling some team actions in Automation, so keep an eye out for updates in our community posts early next year. You’re absolutely right, team types are the foundation for eventually allowing different types of teams to appear in specific places, like particular fields or JSM work items.

I’ve also noted your idea about setting up a custom team field so that only members of that team can be selected in the Assignee field. That’s a great suggestion, and we’ll keep it in mind as we continue to evolve these features💡