We’re improving Fields management in the Admin pages of Jira

[#1]

Hey Jira admins!

I’m Carol, one of the Product Managers working in the Jira Admin space, and I’m here to announce updates that will be coming to how fields are handled in Jira. If you’ve been following this space, you might have noticed that we’ve recently rolled out a new fields experience in our team-managed project, and mentioned that we will be bringing the changes to company-managed projects as well.

Today, I’ll outline our overall plan then highlight the changes are coming first. As the features roll out, I’ll share new community posts that detail these changes before they roll out to your sites.

Big updates to Fields

When all is said and done, we’re aiming to improve the fields management experience in Jira in two ways:

1. Make it easier to use - Our updates will improve the look and feel of the experience and also simplify useful but dense concepts. Because what’s the point of having powerful features if they require a doctorate degree to use?

2. Make it more powerful and nimble - Jira is built to help organizations at scale get things done. The sheer volume of data needed for organizations to do this requires robust tooling. We’re planning features to empower admins when managing fields, such as making identifying and removing outdated fields easier.

Make no mistake: this is a big change. To ensure your sites and your data aren’t impacted, we’ll be releasing updates and improvements slowly over the coming year. I’ll be updating this space to both inform you of upcoming changes as well as giving you an avenue to provide feedback.

Since we’re shipping features in stages, some of what we ship will be temporary but it’ll be really cool in the end. Thanks in advance for your patience during this change.

The changes coming in June/July

Let’s discuss the first changes rolling out to sites starting end of June. The majority of the changes in this first release lay the groundwork for future features.

We’ve rebuilt the Fields page (formerly the Custom fields page), and with it comes a few changes:

• the list now includes system Fields (e.g. Summary and Description)

• you can now sort and filter by field type categories, and also sort separately on screens and contexts

• the table is now customisable, with the ability to toggle columns on/off (p.s. it includes a new column for field id)

• you’ll be able to create and edit fields more seamlessly within the page

However, this redesign hasn’t yet touched all aspects of field management. You’ll go back to the old experience when you:

• add or edit a field’s context

• add a field to screens, or

• create a field using a field type from a third-party app

We’ll be working on these and shipping them to you incrementally.

Finally, there’ll also a new action menu item, “Add field to field configuration schemes” added in the coming weeks. This is part of the first UI changes in conjunction with the changes we’re making in the backend, announced in this article under “Field configuration changes”.

I highly recommend clicking through to read about the changes, but in short, we are making the associations of Fields to Projects more direct and intentional, to reduce the amount of irrelevant fields showing up as users interact with Jira across it’s many surfaces. This will also help to optimise the load times across Jira if your instance has a lot of custom fields.

What’s next?

Without going into all the details, we’re planning to:

• include team-managed project fields into the Fields page

• simplify and merge the concepts of field configuration and field configuration schemes (and the visibility aspect of field contexts), to make the relationship between Fields and Projects more direct.

I’d like to take the opportunity to thank all of you who have given us feedback along the way and joined us on research calls. I enjoy meeting you all and love your passion towards helping us make Jira better for you. Please leave all questions, comments, feedback below and keep watching this space for more.

[Pallavi Shirodkar]

This looks amazing! 

[Paul Pasler]

Hi Carol,

Thanks for the announcement!

Are there any follow-up tasks to do for us as an app vendor providing Forge custom field types?

Cheers,
paul

[Carol Low]

hey @Paul Pasler - none needed, we just need a bit more time to make sure we have it all working smoothly on our side. If all goes well, we'll be able to add this on while we're still rolling out progressively or shortly after.

[Faiz Aziz]

Great ! So exited to see.

[Florian Leuchtweis]

That looks so helpful!
And then a column for the field ID? Finally! It's about time!

[Rune Rasmussen]

Firstly, and this is not just towards you, but Atlassian in general when making blog posts.
Please proof read the post a bit more before posting them.
Almost every post is followed by at least 3 edits during the next 40 minutes and each edit sends out a new email.

Or build yourself a "suppress email notifications" or "Minor edit" function to prevent this.

Secondly.
Will we be able to sort on every column, or just on select columns?
It's 2025 and unsortable columns should be illegal, or at least prohibited by a greater cosmic power.

Will we be able to actually edit system fields, or just see them?
It would be very good to be able to restrict the Assignee field to only select users from a specific group

[Inbar Shtibel Levi]

Great news!

Adding the ability to clone a custom field will be amazing! Please consider it.. even just the ability to copy field values to another field.

[s_weber]

Hi @Carol Low , 

awesome to see this happening, indeed, its a huge change under the hood!

Is there an EAP or so, where we can take part?

We have a lot of ideas questions and features we see useful, as we have quite a lot of fields, options, projects etc. And coming from server, we do see a huge gap which we partially fill with Analytics Charts we build, but that's only to view, never in combination with taking action and never live.

Thank you and BR
Sascha

[Justin Racklin]

It'd be good if you make it so that field names could be changed and update automatically throughout the project in things like automations and workflows instead of having to do so manually or create new fields that serve the same purpose.  Thanks!

[Dave Meredith]

It's nice to see the admin UI being refreshed to more modern and expected functionality. Users are a priority for selling licences but poor admins have been dealing with terrible UI for decades now.

If you're updating terrible UI around custom fields can you please also address this:

Drag and drop has existed for too long for this abomination of UI to still be acceptable.

[Josh]

@Carol Low our team is going to be so excited with everything that you've listed here as upcoming features. There are at least 6 that are going to make huge impact for our organization on a daily basis. Thank you for tackling this important work!

As part of the field enhancements, do you plan to provide the ability to allow fields to have more than one context within a project? This JAC request currently has over 1,400 votes and it would be a major benefit for companies that are trying to reduce custom field counts.

• JRACLOUD-6851 - Allow more than one custom field context to be associated with the same project but different issue types

[Andrew Culver]

Managing field contexts is probably the most common thing I do when managing fields. Hope to see this added to the new UI soon.

This looks like you're focusing on the management of the fields themselves, but the current management of where those fields are displayed in various views is a complete mess. Hope to see some improvements there as well.

[Alson Boo]

Thank you Carol. 

[Peter Norris]

Welcome improvements, Carol!

I find the administration of work items terribly neglected and inconsistent - for instance, why do Workflow Schemes all show on 1 page, whereas we have to click through Issue Type Schemes?

Why is it so difficult to extract a list of active projects and their lead & category?

Why do projects associated to Issue Type Schemes cut off after 100?

Why is it so difficult to get a list of projects associated to Issue Type Schemes?

I could go on...

But, this is a good step in the right direction!

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Carol Low 

Thanks to you and the team for these improvements.

How do you see this impacting Jira Product Discovery (JPD) field configuration, particularly for the overlapping global fields?

Kind regards,
Bill

[Steve Rhodes]

Hi @Carol Low great to see this getting a release. Looking forward to trying it out (outside of a Figma screen!)

[Haddon Fisher]

WOW @Carol Low I am so incredibly excited for these changes - so much of administering Jira is banging rocks together and it is AMAZING to see this given some love! I cannot tell you how immensely pumped I am for "include team-managed project fields into the Fields page" :)

Question for you:

Is this going to go through a beta\feedback period akin to the new UI changes? As energized as I am, I am also a little apprehensive given how some of the other UI changes have gone down; I suspect many of us are here to do whatever it takes to make sure this lands with maximum success!

[Josh]

@Bill Sheboy great point about JPD. Would love to see all fields consolidated in one place regardless of the product that uses them.

[Carol Low]

Wow, firstly, thank you all for your comments - I’ll try to address them here and then might incorporate some FAQ back into the main post.

@Rune Rasmussen - 

Really appreciate you letting us know, I personally relate to notification overload and especially over minor edits. I’ll share this more broadly to see how we can address this.

You’ll be able to sort on all columns. I did notice in my testing instance we currently have it off for Description and fieldID - I'll check in with the team if there's any greater cosmic power in the way.

System Fields - showing them is the first step, we’ll have to cater for specific features additionally. Sharing your most needed edits will help us prioritise this. For example, we are well aware that default values for Description is desired.

@Inbar Shtibel Levi -

Can you please share some use cases you’d like to use Clone for? I’d like to understand it a bit more. (particularly if it's to work around some function we aren't supporting)

@s_weber @Haddon Fisher -

There’ll be EAPs for some of the bigger changes along the way. Please send me a short message about what you'd be interested to give feedback on at clow@atlassian.com and I’ll invite you when we are ready. With the changes we’re shipping soon, we don’t have an EAP as they are pretty straightforward, but we will review all feedback and iterate. 

To set some expectations... there will be some loose ends with the first release, as mentioned we are still getting to some of the experience within the Fields page itself, but we decided the value of the other features was enough to not hold the whole release back. 

@Justin Racklin -

I hear you - for full transparency this is not yet in scope because we have a bunch more foundations to solve, but we’ll keep this on the radar.

@Dave Meredith -

I am with you and I can’t wait to update the Options screen (and all of Field contexts). 

@Josh -

Allowing multiple context is definitely part of our ambitions. We had found some foundational issues when we first looked at it that would make the change far too high in effort. With the changes we’ve laid out, we’ll finally be able to build this as an incremental feature, so yes, it is in the plans.

@Andrew Culver -

Your observation is right, we are trying to tackle management of fields with these changes. Are there particular views you are concerned about, or is that in general? Keen to understand a bit more.

@Peter Norris -

The admin space definitely needs a bit of love. Not to open a can of worms here, but if we offered a natural language way to answer some of those questions you just asked, would that be helpful?

@Bill Sheboy @Josh -

This should not impact JPD field configurations. Is there a particular change you are interested to see?

When we show team-managed fields on the page, this will include JPD fields as well. The actions on them might be limited to begin with, so I’m keen to hear the top action(s) you’d like to take on those fields. Additionally, how important is it to see all the fields in a single, mixed list?

[Peter Norris]

@Carol Low natural language would work, yes. I still would like some simple additional fields on the Project Settings screen for metadata about projects (e.g. so we can record what department the project belongs to, and even a secondary Project Lead would be helpful).

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks @Carol Low 

As other commentators stated, a big kudos to you and Atlassian on improvements like this! And making it gradual! That helps in preparing, understanding and buying into the changes.

Also, in your image, I noticed "Field Schemes" on the left - i assume this is in relation to the "...simplify and merge the concepts of field configuration and field configuration schemes..." point? Yeah, i have often struggled with field configurations and FC schemes.

I am also going to email you if that is ok :) I would love to be part of feedback and also sharing concerns to a listening ear :) Community rocks, doesn't it?!

Thank you

Yatish

[Kelly Arrey]

Hi @Carol Low

Thanks, we're really looking forward to these changes. To follow on to @Bill Sheboy's point above, I'm also very interested in how this is going to affect JPD/Team-managed project fields.

The challenge that I have now is seeing stuff like this when I'm trying to write a filter or adjust filter columns:

There are 3 fields named "Linked issues" (different capitalization, but still). But if I go to the Custom Fields admin page, I only see one "Linked issues" field:

So it's not clear how I can "administer" the two "Linked issues" fields that aren't shown here.

Is that something that this initiative will address? 

Thanks!

Kel

[Josh]

Thanks again, @Carol Low .

This has to be one of the most universally positive Community threads related to UI changes that I have seen in a long time. :-)

What you described here meets our main pain point (lack of visibility in a single place):

When we show team-managed fields on the page, this will include JPD fields as well.

In terms of actions that we'd take from the list, we'd ideally be able to jump over to the JPD / team-managed project that uses the field. As an alternative, if there was some sort of indication which project housed the field that would likely suffice.

[Stefan Draber]

Thanks for these insights @Carol Low

I'm really looking forward to the upcoming UI improvements, because as somebody already stated earlier: Jira administrators usually aren't the main target group for UI improvements in Jira, which is a bit frustrating, at least for us admins.

I'd like to follow up on what @Rune Rasmussen said: in Jira administration, every page with table views of configurable items should offer filters and sorting mechanisms for every column - by default.

Great to see that your product team took that point and made their homeworks, but there are still so many pages left where there's no filtering and no sorting for some columns for no obvious reason.

It would be super helpful if you could raise this issue to some "admin page design authority" a.k.a. cosmic power to get it solved broadly.

Thanks again and best regards,

Stefan

[Rodolfo Romero - Adaptavist]

Great news indeed!

@Carol Low As we continue working on helping customers to migrate to Cloud, is there any documentation that has information related to the impact to migrations using JCMA or will this be taken care of when the new features are rolled out?