Hello everyone! I’m curious about which Jira fields other project managers find absolutely crucial for their daily work. I’m trying to optimize our setup and want to know what works best for different teams.
Do you find yourself constantly using certain fields like Status for tracking progress or Priority for organizing tasks? Maybe you have custom fields that make your life easier?
I’m also interested to know what type of projects or industry you work in, as I imagine different contexts might need different approaches.
Any insights would be really helpful!
After managing software projects for years, Epic Link and Story Points are the two fields teams constantly mess up in their initial setup. Epic Link keeps you sane during sprint planning - you can actually see how tasks connect to bigger initiatives instead of drowning in random tickets. Assignee and Reporter seem obvious but trust me, clear ownership saves tons of confusion later. I’m obsessed with Fix Version for release planning. Other teams can instantly see what’s hitting which release instead of playing guessing games. Labels are criminally underused. They’re perfect for stuff like technical debt, customer requests, or compliance work that doesn’t fit your normal project structure. Once you get consistent labeling habits, the filtering becomes incredibly powerful.
workflow status can b a pain - teams often make it complicated with too many options or too simple like todo/done. Priority? Yeah, it gets overused, like suddenly everything’s “high priority” lol. But the resolution field is really overlooked, especially for tracking bugs.
Component and Sprint fields are absolute game-changers for enterprise projects. Component lets you organize work by team or functional area - super critical when you’ve got multiple dev teams working on different parts of the same product. Sprint field tracks current work, but the historical data is gold for retrospectives and capacity planning. Due Date gets ignored way too often, but it’s essential for external dependencies and stakeholder communication. Nothing worse than missing a client deadline because you only looked at sprint dates. I lean heavily on the Description field too - sounds basic, but having a standardized template with acceptance criteria, context, and technical notes cuts down on so much back-and-forth during development. Time Tracking fields are controversial but necessary if you’re doing client billing or resource planning in consulting.