📣 Product Update: Global fields & Fields management page

[#1]

Hello community!

We’re thrilled to announce two new features that will make it easier to manage fields in Jira Product Discovery: Global fields that can be used across discovery projects and a brand-new field management page 🚀

Global fields

Global fields are custom fields that can be reused across multiple projects and different Jira products.

With this feature, you can create centrally managed fields: all field properties are the same across all projects and can be updated from a single place. Learn more

To create a new global field:

1. Go to the top bar and select ⚙️ > Products.

2. Under Jira Product Discovery, select Global fields.

3. Click Create global field, select the type of field you want to create, and click Create.

ℹ️ Please note: You can simply click the "Copy value" button in your project field configuration to move the value from the project field to the global field. 
To do it in bulk, follow this tutorial to migrate values to global fields via csv.

Use cases

• You want to standardize across different projects: you can now achieve consistent naming and options.

• You want to reduce admin overhead: a field can be created once, updated once, and updates are automatically visible in all projects.

• You are using two discovery projects and often move ideas from one project to another: global fields values will be retained when moving.
  
  

New field management page

With the introduction of global fields, we’re also releasing a new field management experience that makes it easy to create new fields and add existing global fields to your project from a single page. Learn more 🔥

While Jira admins are the only ones able to create and modify global fields, thanks to this page, adding global fields to discovery projects can be delegated to project admins 👨🏼‍💻 for less friction.

To access the new fields management page, in your discovery project, go to Project settings > Fields.

Both of these features will make it easier for Jira Product Discovery users to achieve consistency across their projects, while at the same time reducing the burden on admins. We will continue making improvements to both features, so stay tuned!

Don’t hesitate to share any feedback on the feature using the “Give feedback” button in Jira Product Discovery or the comments below.

[Haddon Fisher]

This is great news! There's a basic expectation set by the last 20+ years that custom fields are instance-wide, so seeing this start to be addressed is great.

One callout: You keep trying to delegate custom field access to project managers (team-managed projects and now this "field management page") without really addressing any of the underlying problems this would create.

For example, does this feature enforce uniqueness in field names? When site admins were the only ones who could create fields it was somewhat safe for Jira to assume there wouldn't be duplicative names or that if there were, it was by design; the introduction of team-managed projects exposed the limitations with that assumption and the many UX issues and technical bugs relying on it to be true.

I absolutely love that y'all are continuing to innovate and try things. And, it is really important that these experiments and risks don't continue to compromise the rest of the experience.

[Naz James]

Thank you Hermance, I was anxiously waiting for this to be available so I can streamline :)

[Thierry BLOCH]

Hello 

Thank you for this great feature. 

But i don't see people field? 

It will be add soon?

Regards

Thierry

[Ignacio Pulgar]

Hi @Hermance NDounga ,

Thanks for leading this change! I'm sure it will make a big difference.

We have noticed global fields can only work in a Jira Product Discovery project if the field has a context for Global (all projects) + Any issue types.

Unfortunately, Jira Product Discovery projects do not show up in the list of projects for which a context can be configured.

Setting the field context as Global (all projects) and just the Idea issue type does not work either.

While the field can be added to the project, an error is being thrown on trying to add a value:

Something went wrong. Field 'customfield_12790' cannot be set. It is not on the appropriate screen, or unknown.

This is a very big limitation for us, since we have based all our Jira configurations around custom fields contexts (good practice) and many projects use the very same screen, containing multiple fields which show up just in the appropriate projects thanks to narrowed contexts.

If one Jira Product Discovery project wanted to use some of those custom fields, we would need to create a global context for all projects and issue types, which would make the fields available in way too many projects where they shouldn't appear.

Therefore, I think Jira Product Discovery projects should support custom field contexts just like normal Jira projects.

As a Jira admin, I also agree with @Haddon Fisher that allowing end users to create new fields guarantees ending up with a too messy Jira instance (duplicate field names should be avoided, and Jira admins should be able to disable the ability of creating new custom fields), but that's another topic...

Thanks for looking into this!

[Guy Yasoor]

Hi @Hermance NDounga , quick question - should this work for the built-in "Organizations" field from Jira Service Management? I can't find it in the global field list

[Hermance NDounga]

Hello Ignacio, 

Fields context don't work with team-managed projects. Even in Jira Software, if you create a team-managed project, you will not be able to use a field that has a context in it. 

Jira Product Discovery projects are team-managed, which is why context are not supported. For a Jira custom field to work in a team-managed project (regardless of the product), it needs to have no context apply. 

We investigated to see if we could bypass this limitation, but we cannot; it necessitates a platform change that is not prioritized at the moment. However, we are working on making all this clearer for our end-users. 

Regarding the ability to create fields in Jira Product Discovery: 

• Only Jira admins have the right to create global / access the global field page, so Jira admins don't have the possibility to disable this, because they are the only ones able to use it. 
• Projects admins have the right to create new project-scoped fields (fields that can only be used in a unique project) . By making sure you have only one project admin who is aware of the company governance, or by making only Jira admins also project admins, you make sure new projects fields aren't created without governance. 

Cheers, 

Hermance

[Hermance NDounga]

Hi @Guy Yasoor 

Unfortunately, "Organizations" is not a Jira custom field; it is a Jira Service Management system field, so it can only be used in Jira Service Management, neither in Jira Software nor in Jira Product Discovery for the moment. 

Best Regards,
Hermance
Product Manager @ Jira Product Discovery

[Mikael Sandberg]

Hi! Are there any plans on supporting Assets object fields? Our use case is that we sync teams from an external application and would like to be able to associate an idea with a team.

[Jennifer Iglesias Morales]

Hi,

Are there problems with global fields of type date? Jira does not recognize them when you try to use them in a Jira Software project.
In our case, we started an idea in Jira software and at a certain point we created the idea in Product discovery, bringing information from Software to Discovery with the use of global fields, but for some reason that I don't know, it cannot be done with the date fields.

[Haddon Fisher]

Fields context don't work with team-managed projects. Even in Jira Software, if you create a team-managed project, you will not be able to use a field that has a context in it. 

Jira Product Discovery projects are team-managed, which is why context are not supported. For a Jira custom field to work in a team-managed project (regardless of the product), it needs to have no context apply. 

We investigated to see if we could bypass this limitation, but we cannot; it necessitates a platform change that is not prioritized at the moment. However, we are working on making all this clearer for our end-users. 

I wish y'all would stop choosing for "quick" over "correct"; its this approach that has left Jira a UX dumpster fire. Don't get me wrong, I would love for the team-managed project custom field administration to be overhauled, however introducing an entirely separate pattern to solve the exact same problem just for JPD is not helping.

You cannot both have and eat cake; either Jira is one tool, and it has one pattern to solve a given problem, or it's a whole bunch of distinct tools which need to be made actually distinct.

[Yuliia Vyborova]

Hi @Hermance NDounga ! First, I love the field management, it's absolutely useful for me as Jira admin!
I have 2 questions:

1) when I open Global fields settings page, I don't see any fields under Discovery projects, only Jira fields (see screenshot)? Did I create fields in Product Discovery project in a wrong way? Please advise where can I check this

2) once I add Global field to my discovery projects, how can I keep them in sync with Jira software? i.e. we have Maturity field as a custom field in Jira software and it is compatible with Product Discovery. I added it as Global field to my Discovery project and it populated the options, but not the values. Is this possible to set auto-fill of Maturity field similar to Project target field auto-filled from linked ticket?

[Hermance NDounga]

Hi @Yuliia Vyborova 

1) If you have 0 discovery global fields, it means that you haven't created a global field from this page. The fields you have created in each individual projects aren't global so aren't surfaced here. And fields you have created from the custom field page in Jira are displayed under the tab "Jira field. 

So the maturity field is definitely showing up under "Jira field". 

2) It is not possible to maintain a "random" custom field with the autofill feature - it specifically just look at dates fields. So in your case, you'd need to create an automation rule that copy the value from the linked delivery ticket to the idea. You can start from this project template (located in the global automation and adapt it to your need.

Maybe for the first trigger you want to schedule it as a one time tommorow, and then modify the trigger to be for any change in the delivery ticket. 

 

Best Regards,
Hermance
Product Manager @ Jira Product Discovery

[Yuliia Vyborova]

@Hermance NDounga got it, thank you very much!

[Ignacio Pulgar]

Hi @Hermance NDounga ,

It's a pitty that Jira Product Discovery currently lacked the ability to create company-managed projects instead of team-managed ones.

Anyways, thanks for clarifying.