Improve Group By Connections Field

[Brandon Moberg]

Being able to use Connections is such a huge improvement, but one challenge is Grouping By a Connections field in a view.

Example scenario

1. You have 3 Jira Product Discovery Projects: Team A, Team B, Team C
2. Each of those products uses a three-tier connection ladder:
   1. Company OKR
   2. Idea
   3. Experiment
3. While the ideas and experiments will vary by project, the Company OKR connection values are consistent across all 3 projects (example: OKR1: Money, OKR2: Views, OKR3: Retention)
4. In Jira Roadmaps, you create a single roadmap for stakeholders to visualize the roadmap for all 3 teams (Jira PD projects)
5. You want to Group By the Company OKR connections field to show stakeholders all of the Ideas under each company OKR
6. The Group By duplicates the Company OKR value by each project even though the values are the same and the Company OKR connection field is global
   1. In this example, the Jira Roadmap ends up with:
      1. 3 groupings for OKR1: Money
      2. 3 groupings for OKR2: Views
      3. 3 groupings for OKR3: Retention
7. This makes the Group By connections field less than ideal

The workaround we're deploying for now can work around this, but it's not ideal:

1. Create a global field (non-connection) called Company OKR
2. Use automation that triggers on a Discovery - Connected link type and copies the {{destinationIssue.issuelinks.first.inwardIssue.fields.summary}} into the global Company OKR field (non-connection)
3. Update Jira Roadmap to Group By the global Company OKR field (non-connection) instead of the connections field

Any plans to address this? TYIA!

[Tanguy Crusson · Accepted solution]

Hi @Brandon Moberg that looks like a bug - I've asked the team to investigate. Thanks for reporting it!

[Brandon Moberg]

Awesome, that's good news, thanks @Tanguy Crusson

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Brandon Moberg Actually this might not be a bug after all. 

Did you create the KR once per project and just gave them the same name in all 3 projects? If so then this behaviour is expected: if you create 3 ideas called the same name, they are still 3 different ideas. 

For your scenario here's what I'd suggest:

• Create a project for the company-level stuff, e.g. OKRs
• And one project per team for each team-level stuff (ideas, experiments)

Here's how that would work in a demo: https://www.loom.com/share/586a601436c645fb89251084213fd569?sid=e52f45f3-9010-4377-a6df-fc30707b2f63

[Brandon Moberg]

@Tanguy Crusson that was it, thank you! This suggestion worked exactly as desired.