New Features: Team type permissions, custom fields, and more!

[#1]

Hi Teams community 👋

We’ve been listening closely to your feedback, and we’re so excited to share a bunch of new features designed to make Teams even more powerful and easy to use. Here’s a look at what’s new:

• Team type permissions

• Team custom fields

• Team context in rovo chat

• Team heirarchy tree view

Team type permissions

We want to give you more control over how your teams are managed. With our new Team type permissions, admins can now easily decide who can view, join, or edit teams based on their "type" (like functional vs. cross-functional teams). This helps keep sensitive team structures secure while making sure collaboration stays open and easy where it’s needed most.

More information at https://support.atlassian.com/platform-experiences/docs/delegate-permissions-for-team-types/

Team custom fields

Every organization is unique, and now your team data can be too! We’ve added Team custom fields so you can capture the specific details that matter to you - like "Department," "Focus Area," or "Office Location." This makes it a breeze to categorize, search, and report on teams across the Atlassian platform.

Smarter Team Context in Rovo Chat

Rovo Chat is now "team-aware." When you launch Rovo from a Team Profile, it automatically understands the specific team context, including their description, members, and status. This allows you to ask targeted questions like "Who are the members of this team?" and get accurate, grounded answers without any extra explanation.

Team hierarchy tree view

Visualizing your organization just got a whole lot easier! Our new Team hierarchy tree view uses a simple nested table to show how teams relate to one another. This "team of teams" view lets you see high-level ownership at a glance and dive into sub-teams to see exactly how work is flowing across the hierarchy.

We’d love your feedback!

Please let us know how these features are working for you and where we can keep improving. 🙏 Feel free to tag me in any feedback you have, we can’t wait to hear from you!

[gil]

Are these features live already in production?

[William Pan]

@gil Yes all these features are live in production!

[elliott_krogmeier]

Is it possible to reference the Team custom fields within automations?

[Dave Mathijs]

I'd love to see a that when assigning a work item to an Assignee, that the linked Team (the only or first Team the user is a member of) is automatically selected/changed. Right now, this is a manual action.

Regularly, a work item moves between Assignees of a different team. If you only change the Assignee, but not the Team, there's a discrepancy between Team/Assignee resulting in incorrect information in boards, lists, etc.

[Matt Lane]

Some great feature additions for Teams @William Pan , thank you!

But gotta ask, when will we have the freedom to use the Out-of-the-Box "Team" field in Sub-tasks, without the Sub-task always being forced (locked) to inherit the Team that owns the Parent work item?

[William Pan]

Hey folks, thanks so much for the feedback

@elliott_krogmeier Not yet, but this is a piece of feedback that we've heard already. We're already looking into how we could build and ship this.

@Dave Mathijs and @Matt Lane Let me pass this feedback onto the team.

[Milad Sayad]

Hi @William Pan

These are really great improvements, good on you.

I have one question, one piece of feedback and one suggestion.

I am trying to restrict the team creation to certain users. Do I understand correctly that we cannot remove the permission to create a team of the Team type (under Type-level control)?

And which user group "Team app users" actually refers to? We have user groups for Project app users, Goal app users, and other Atlassian apps, but I could not find any dedicated user group for the Team app. 

I really hope you build the ability to reference custom fields in Automation smart value. e.g. {{team.manager.displayName}}}.

Kind regards,
Milad

[Rune Rasmussen]

This update is a step in the right direction to address some of our main blockers for actually using the built in Teams for anything at all.

Some observations:
For Select Fields, adding the options that can be selected is quite finicky and doesn't really work.
I have tried adding our 7 organizational layers several times now, but it's not all the options I enter that actually gets saved. The ordering of the options that do get added are not the ordering I added them in.
The ordering wouldn't be a problem if we could re-arrange them.

Adding the options one-by-one (Edit, add, save, edit, add, save...) seems to preserve the ordering though.

For Fields in general it would be very beneficial to have mandatory fields for different Team Types.
Example: We have development teams. They have a dedicated Scrum master. We create a Team Type of Development Team and a people field for Scrum master. It would be great if that field was then mandatory.
Or
We re-create our line organization in Teams and each team needs to have a Line Manager. This field should be mandatory.

New Team Types all seem to be verified, which I don't see the benefit of enforcing.

Are there any news on being able to create (and scope) Team Picker custom fields in Jira? Or let us scope and set contexts on the current Teams field?

Not all Teams are relevant in all Spaces, so being able to create and/or scope Teams fields much in the same way we can for custom User Picker fields would be extremely useful.

Permissions on the built-in Team Types can't be changed.
Are there any plans to let us do so? We need this control before we can start using the Teams feature.

Team-level control has a Field column, making it seem like we can add a custom field that could determine who can control an individual team. That could be a Line Manager field, for instance.
Is that supposed to be possible and maybe I'm doing something wrong, or is it on the roadmap?

[Matt Lane]

@Rune Rasmussen - Great point on the need for being able to scope the 'Team' picker field, as you said, not all Teams are relevant to every space.

Use case, e.g. IT Service Desk there is a ton of support teams, and you want to narrow down scope of Teams that can actually be assigned these tickets, reduce noise when picking.

On a separate note, for those that want to be able to assign Sub-tasks to a 'Team' using the OOTB 'Team' field, that is not the 'Team' that owns the Parent of the sub-task...  there is a Atlassian backlog item already for this:  https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-88186    Feel free to upvote and watch.

[Dave Mathijs]

@William Pan Is a Team Lead/Team Owner on the roadmap? Besides the team member, we'd like to identify the Team Lead/Team Owner of a team.

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Hey  @William Pan ,

I can only echo the comments already posted. Great new addition and definetly moving in the right direction!

As @Milad Sayad  mentions the inability to block everyone from creating Teams does still cause issues. While this is is a good step that now for verified Teams the creation can be scoped it would be great to have such granular control over all types of teams.

The main reason here is that since there is no scoping on a space itself to what Teams can be selected that it becomes chaotic really fast.

Ideally:

• Allow limiting the creation of Teams to specific groups
• Add the ability to add a scope to the Team field (or some kind of permission like the assignable user but then assignable Teams) to make sure only the Teams that work on a specific space can be chosen ( @Rune Rasmussen  )
• Add a link between Team and Assignee, it doesn't make sense that you can choose a Team and then choose an Assignee that is not a member of that team. This causes all kinds of weird things within JSM ( @Dave Mathijs  )

As a side note (but not less important imho) make the name of the Team unique. (Especially after migrations) the fact that a Team with the same name can exist several times does not make sense when you try to select a Team on a work item.

The moment we have a full concept where all Teams are centrally managed and there is scoping to a space/relationship between assignee and Team this will be something that can fully be used in JSM environments!

Looking forward tho to any further development and happy to see that development is still continueing on the Teams concept!

[Josh]

@Dave Mathijs I've discussed the Team Lead/Owner topic with the Teams team, and my understanding is that they are working towards including that among other improvements in the not-too-distant future.