Jira Approvals in company-managed projects: Pros & cons of forthcoming updates?

Question

Hello all,

Atlassian Cloud changes Sep 8 to Sep 15, 2025 | Atlassian Cloud | Atlassian Documentation

With the announcement from this week's "Cloud changes" blog that Approvals are coming to company-managed projects (finally :D ) I am wondering if anyone has experience using the feature in their production environments?

I have a test team-managed project that I've used to play around with the approvals feature. I've recreated some of the processes we currently use with the approval feature and do see some benefits from it. I've counted that less-clicks are required to move items forward in a process, but, and I may be thinking of this wrong, the approval process doesn't reduce the number of statuses required or other administrative tasks from us site-admins.

So, just re-iterating the question- does anyone have experience using it and can speak to some pros and cons?

Bonus question- has anyone set-up useful automations with the approval feature?

* I'm working on the bonus-question today and will update if I find anything helpful!

If Bronna from Atlassian sees this, thanks for the product feedback session a few months ago where we discussed adding this feature to company-managed projects!

Morgan Watts_9u2pqd · Answer

Thanks for the response! I'll take a look at your article. I do like having a button that clearly says "approve." It's a much easier concept to convey of "click green button" compared to convincing users "dragging a card isn't difficult."

Mikael Sandberg · Answer

I have experience from using approvals both in JSM and Jira. In Jira I created my own automation since it didn't have the build-in feature until now, and I wrote about it in this article.

I can see how this is useful, not just in the scenario I wrote about for recruiting, but also for software teams that need to implement approval for features. Back in the day when I was on DC we had a gate keeping status that only managers could transition the work item out of, and in that case you could use the approval since you could then have automations to notify pending approvers,

At my previous job we used automations to add approvers based on what department the work item was for and depending on the change it could skip specific approvals as well.