Group By for Contributors

[Rayne Cypher]

Both a feature suggestion and question in regards to how other orgs handle this issue. One of our power users has pointed out the following: 

• Readers cannot use the "Group By" option in view, only sort and filter.   Group by is very useful to see things that are relevant for a specific team, person, or time frame.   Instead, we have to create multiple copies of the same list view for each of those dimensions.

Summary:

Contributors in JPD cannot access the Group By control on any view type. This is currently locked to Creators and Administrators under the "Manage views" permission. We'd like to request that Group By (and ideally Sort and Filter) be available to  Contributors as a personal, non-persistent view option — without allowing them to save or modify the shared view configuration.

 Use case:

Contributors in JPD are often stakeholders, engineers, or cross-functional team members who need to navigate and explore ideas independently. The current behavior forces them to consume views exactly as a Creator configured them, with no ability to pivot the data for their own context — for example, grouping a list of ideas by team, status, or strategic theme.

This creates a bottleneck where Creators must pre-build every permutation of a view that stakeholders might need, rather than letting Contributors self-serve within the existing view.

Proposed behavior:

• Contributors can use Group By, Sort, and Filter controls as personal/temporary session state — changes apply only to their own view and are not saved back to the shared view
• Creators and Administrators retain exclusive control over the default/saved view configuration
• This mirrors how filtering works in many Atlassian products (e.g. Jira Software board filters), where users can adjust their personal view without modifying the shared configuration

Why this matters:

• Reduces friction for stakeholder-facing JPD spaces where the majority of users are Contributors
• Aligns with JPD's goal of making discovery work visible across teams without requiring everyone to be a Creator
• The current all-or-nothing model (either full view management or no view controls) doesn't match real-world usage patterns

[Gabriela - LeanZero]

Hi @Rayne Cypher, James has the permission boundary right, so I'll skip that part. What I'd add is that the session-scoped model you're proposing already exists in JPD, in two places. It hasn't been pointed at Group by for contributors, and that's the case to make.

Contributor filters got it first. Olga Springer's locked filters announcement in February: contributors "can still add additional filters for their own use, but these filters will reset when the view is refreshed." Personal, discarded on refresh, invisible to anyone else. That's your proposed behaviour, already shipped, on filters.

Autosave is the other one. Asked in April whether each person could filter the ideas board without affecting everyone else's view, Tanguy Crusson from Atlassian answered "click on the "lock" icon top right of the view toggle off "autosave"", after which a change is discarded when you navigate out and back in unless someone explicitly saves it. The toggle reads "Autosave view configuration", and "Modify grouping rules" is on Atlassian's own list of what view configuration means, so that machinery already covers grouping. It sits behind being able to edit the view, so it stops at your creators.

On the Manage views permission I'd aim somewhere slightly different than you have. The view permissions page lists three groups who "cannot edit views even if they are granted a can-edit permissions": space members with a contributor role, space members with a creator role that doesn't contain Manage Views, and site users without JPD app access. Contributors are blocked flat, before any permission enters into it, and Manage Views is aimed at the creator line under them, so a custom role probably won't buy you this. That same page also shows the split your power user hit. "Modify view filters or sorting rules" carries a note that a viewer can set one and have refreshing the page revert it. "Modify grouping rules", the line directly under it, has no such note.

Which makes the ask a narrow one. Give contributors the discard-on-refresh behaviour on grouping that they already have on filters. That's a scope change on something built, and an easier yes than a permissions redesign.

I've read this off the docs and those two posts. I don't have a contributor seat to try it on, so treat that half as me corroborating what your power user saw.

[James Gamble]

Hola Rayne,

Your understanding matches the current Jira Product Discovery permission model. Contributors can view and interact with ideas, but they can’t edit views. Atlassian explicitly lists members with the Contributor role as users who can’t be granted edit access to a view.

Because Group By changes the view configuration, it falls on the view-management side of that permission boundary rather than behaving as a temporary personal preference. I couldn’t find a supported setting that lets Contributors use Group By privately while preventing them from modifying the saved view.

For the workflow you described, creating separate Creator-maintained views for the most common groupings is unfortunately the native option today. I agree that it can become cumbersome once stakeholders want to pivot the same dataset by team, status, strategic theme, or other dimensions.

I also couldn’t find a public Atlassian suggestion specifically requesting temporary Group By controls for Contributors. Since you’ve already framed the use case clearly, I’d raise it as a feature suggestion with Atlassian Support or through Jira Product Discovery feedback, emphasizing that the request is for non-persistent, per-user grouping rather than broader Manage views permission. That distinction preserves the Creator-controlled shared view while giving Contributors a way to explore it independently.

Thanks,

James