Users Cannot Select Approvers or See User Avatars in Jira Work Management

[Tony Lloyd]

I’m experiencing an issue in Jira Work Management where some users are unable to select Approvers when editing an issue. Additionally, one of the affected users cannot see other users' avatars in the Board View, while I can.

This issue is only occurring in Jira Work Management, it works as expected on my login, and both affected users are Project Admins.

This applies to all Jira Work Management project in my Jira instance, so I assume its a global setting somewhere

Symptoms

• Users cannot select Approvers (dropdown is empty).
• Affected users cannot see user avatars in the Board View.
• They can assign tasks but cannot assign approvers.
• Works fine for me (also an admin but also Org Admin).

Screenshot Below:

Working for me

Not working for Tom

I can select Approvers

Tom can't select Approvers

[Mercy]

This usually happens when affected users don’t have permission to view or search all users across the site. In Jira Work Management, the Approvers field depends on the global “Browse users and groups” permission, which is controlled by the product access group and global permissions in Jira Settings > System > Global permissions. If those users are only project admins but not members of a group with that global permission (for example, jira-users or site-admins), they won’t be able to populate user picker fields like Approvers or see avatars in views that rely on user directory data.