Product update: field descriptions in Jira Product Discovery

[#1]

Hi everyone, 

When we implemented the beta of Jira Product Discovery we took a few shortcuts technically speaking - the dreaded technical debt! - and we're now cleaning house. As part of this there we'll sometimes need to retire features that have very low usage but are costly to maintain. 

Today's post is about one of them: the ability to create custom descriptions for fields. 

Today the system allows you to create custom descriptions for any field, including fields that are built in Jira (not only Jira Product Discovery) and don't support this in the rest of Jira: 

• summary: A one-liner explaining what the idea is
• assignee: Which user the idea is assigned to
• created: When the idea was created
• creator: The user who created the idea
• key: The Jira issue key
• reporter: If the idea was suggested by someone other than the creator, you can specify this user as the reporter
• status: The idea's status within the workflow
• updated: When the idea was last updated
• labels: Data used to tag or classify ideas

We have checked and less than 0.1% of fields of this type have a custom description in the system today. So to keep things simple we're going to retire the ability to change them. 

In a couple of weeks you won't be able to edit them anymore, and they will be replaced by the descriptions provided above. Don't worry though! Custom descriptions for all custom fields (the ones you create yourselves) won't be impacted. You'll still be able to edit them. It really only applies to the fields explicitly listed above.

Update: this change was inadvertently turned on before we communicated it to you, our apologies! It's back on for now to give you a chance to copy the data somewhere else if you use this feature. 

[David Laine]

Hi @Tanguy Crusson 

The only issue we had with this is that the only "people" fields that are supported in the Automation drop downs are "Assigned" and "Creator". We had planned on changing the "Assignee" to "Product Manager" which we could then use in Automation to email specific notifications to that manager about their ideas. Need to re-think this now - alternatively - when do you expect custom "people" fields to be supported in Automation