Issue Matrix for Business Users

Owned by Rosen Marinkov
Feb 17, 2023
5 min read

On this page:

Use case overview

Jira Software was designed to accommodate the needs of technical users looking for an efficient way to track and manage their agile product development. Over time, the platform got adopted by many different teams - both technical and non-technical-like (e.g., HR, Marketing, etc.). The course of such cross-departmental adoption comes with its own set of challenges - while Jira's current interface is well-tailored to accommodate the processes of technical teams, it has been a struggle for business users to fully realize its potential due to various UI roadblocks such as:

  • Lack of visibility into sub-tasks & linked issues: important information confined in sub-tasks or linked issues is neither intuitive nor readily accessible and requires users to open each issue to get the full picture separately.

  • Inability to understand displayed information: the lack of table headers prevents business users from semantically understanding the displayed information.

  • Inflexible configurations: out-of-the-box Jira does not allow users to customize the view for different Issue Types or Projects, thus stagnating the way teams organize their projects.

In the following use case, we will examine how Issue Matrix for Jira can help you overcome these challenges and enable your business to maximize the Jira investment by accommodating the needs of their non-technical teams.

Introducing Issue Matrix for business users

Issue Matrix for Jira is a highly customizable app which enables you to enhance how Sub-tasks, Linked Issue and Issues in Epics get visualized in the Issue View Screen. Implemented as a custom field, the app allows you to overcome the limitations and the drawbacks of Jira's default visualization, and provides an invaluable enhancement of the main screen, making it more user-friendly and effective to use.

Modes for better visibility into sub-tasks & linked issues

Issue Matrix for Jira has several different modes you can choose and configure to fit the needs of your team. Each mode enables you to define the issues, the type of information displayed, and how the issues are visualized in the Issue View screen. E.g., in Sub-Tasks mode, Issue Matrix lists all the Sub-tasks of the current issue, including all necessary additional information such as summary, status, assignee, Story points, category, etc. The app gives you the ability to specify Sub-tasks types, customize column headers, further filter your Sub-tasks with an additional JQL, and sort them by priority.

This feature significantly enhances the way users interact with Jira and saves teams countless hours and thousands of unnecessary click-throughs, thus improving the overall productivity of your team.


Issue Matrix for Jira has the following modes:

Content features for better flexibility & information display

Additionally, Issue Matrix for Jira has a set of essential options related to the content of the Issue Matrix table. After you choose the Issue Matrix mode, you can configure a subset of the settings below apply to the selected mode.

  • Modes - for each mode, you can define which issues will be included in the Issue Matrix table.

  • Columns - you can choose the columns you want to include in the Issue Matrix table, set  headers and width for the columns.

  • Inline Edit - you can enable inline editing for any field in the Issue Matrix table.

  • Sort By - you can define sort order criteria for the Issue Matrix table.

  • Filter JQL - you can apply additional filtering to the issues in your Matrix mode.

  • Limit - you can specify the number of initially visible issues in the Issue Matrix table.

  • Categories - you can create JQL based categories.

  • Create and Link actions (Issue Links Mode only) - you can define different Create and Link actions.

Issue categorization & inline editing for enhanced productivity

To enhance the productivity of users, Issue Matrix for Jira offers a couple of powerful features designed to enable business users to improve their daily interaction with Jira Software and minimize the time spent on analyzing the status of issues or updating them.

The first feature is Issue categorization - it's designed to enable users to quickly identify certain issues within an Issue Matrix field based on specific criteria (e.g., due date). Categories are defined using a JQL and are represented via colors - if an issue matches a particular category, a colored cell will be shown on the left side of its corresponding row in the Issue Matrix.

The example below shows all deliverables which are overdue in red and all requests with a due date within the next week in yellow.

This feature gives users the unique ability to quickly understand and prioritize their work without the need to separately open each issue. The color-coded mechanism for issue categorization is highly customizable, which will enable your teams to configure it based on their needs.

The second feature is called inline editing, and it enables users to update issues within an Issue Matrix table quickly. This feature allows users to perform immediate changes to the issue at hand without leaving the current navigation page. When updating an issue that exists in more than one Issue Matrix table, all tables will be automatically updated. Inline editing can also be used to edit system fields, custom fields, and Service Desk fields inline.

The Inline Edit feature is available for:

  • Issues within the Issue Matrix table

  • Agile boards

  • Multi-select fields

  • Service Desk fields

Frequently, Jira issues share common context without being directly linked, which proves problematic for non-technical teams who are looking for a more user-friendly way to navigate through various non-linked issues based on system (e.g., same reporter) or custom (e.g., labels) value field.

Issue Matrix's contextual linking feature enables users to visualize their issues that share a common context, without these issues being directly linked, thus significantly improving users' visibility and bringing context to content. An extension to the JQL syntax, users now compare issue fields with the values stored in the currently viewed issue.

These features are designed to enable non-technical teams to use Jira most effectively and intuitively possible by providing them with unparalleled visibility into sub-tasks and linked issues and allowing them to understand the displayed information semantically. If you are looking to optimize the work of your business users and enable them to use Jira more efficiently, thus maximizing your investment, Issue Matrix for Jira is the solution you were looking for.