3 ways to master your Jira dashboards in 2025

Imagine a wonderful world where you don’t have to sit through meetings desperately trying to stay focused on yet another ponderous presentation that’s bulging with charts and numbers.

It isn’t the data that’s bad – it’s poorly constructed dashboards that are the real issue. 

It’s important to get your data visualization right. Research from the University of Rochester found that more than half of the human brain is dedicated to processing visual information. 

Fortunately, levelling up your charts and dashboards isn’t out of reach. You can get clarity, compelling visualizations, and actionable insights with a few best practices (and a little help from the right tools). 

Creating a good dashboard doesn’t even require coding knowledge or a major time investment. Custom Charts is here to make dashboard creation nice and simple – with all-new functionality and improvements to setting up charts, grouping charts, and calculating values.

Here, we’ll cover some of the top tips for creating, navigating, and keeping data organized in your dashboards.

1. Organize your data like a pro

Your data is meant to tell a story, but for every Citizen Kane, there is a Sharknado. Similarly, for every gorgeous dashboard, there’s a jumbled mess packed with data you don’t need or understand. 

Proper dashboard management is more than getting every add-on you can find, so you can measure as much as you possibly can. Instead, start small and carefully choose essentials to add to so you’re not overwhelmed by the near-limitless options.

How to identify a bad dashboard

• Too many gadgets clogging up the view 

• Too much text for anyone to read

• Irrelevant dashboards or nonsensical pairings of charts

Above – a bad dashboard

How to fix this dashboard

Keep it succinct, group things together in a way that makes sense, and ensure all your charts are labelled clearly.

It’s essential to group data in the most efficient and logical ways to keep dashboards organized. For example, if you're displaying lots of data with similar quantities, you want bar charts and not pie charts.

Some project managers try to cram all their most essential data on a single screen – but as useful as it is to visualize metrics like project status, all issues, or average age of issues, they don’t belong together.

You’ll get more impact either by displaying them on their own or with one or two closely linked metrics that can complement them. 

For example, if you are displaying a text-heavy issue list, pick something linked to that issue list that is purely visual and very simple so as not to detract from your marquee metric. People can only take in so much information at once – so keep it succinct. 

Above – a better dashboard

This updated dashboard clears the clutter and keeps the viewer’s eyes focused on the most important information. It helps ensure your stories are remembered by your audience and not lost in a sea of slides.

Thankfully, Custom Charts for Jira makes a wide range of dashboard templates accessible in just a few clicks. As mentioned earlier, we’ve recently improved how you can set up your charts, group your charts, and calculate values. 

If you want more information on effective data storytelling, you can read our expanded guide.

2. Create and navigate better dashboards

It’s a wonderfully modern problem to have access to too much data. It has become tricky to effectively start making charts and then surface the most useful bits.

The simple solution that can have the most impact is to save commonly used JQL filters so they don’t have to be written out every time you create a new chart. The more templates you have, the quicker you can get up and running with effective data and have more time and energy for the more nuanced bits.

Then, a tool like Simple Search in Custom Charts comes into play. It’s a gadget that allows users to drill into specific data points without having to edit the chart’s configuration.

It enables you to filter all of your data in the ways you want – like creating tabs to enable different views on your dashboards based on who is viewing them. That means you can have different views for when the project manager logs in, versus an individual contributor, or a team lead who needs a handy full-team view.

Customizing your charts with different views makes navigation a breeze.

3. Use custom insights to bring your team to new heights

Project managers thrive on data. It’s the backbone of every status update, progress report, and workflow adjustment. However, we know that the more precise and streamlined you can make your data, the greater effect it will have on your team’s processes and provide insights on what to do next. 

Getting into those granular details in your Jira dashboards is like upgrading from a regular map to a GPS. Instead of observing where your team stands, you can guide them with precision toward their goals. 

Real insight means seeing both the forest and the trees, right? 

Let's focus on just a few metrics that you could track and display in your dashboards to help your team understand their work’s impact.

Releases are often go/no-go points in your project, and they require a lot of attention. Jira natively provides tools for managing versions, but what if you could zoom in on just the unreleased ones? 

This is the “Version Status” filter. Imagine you are gearing up for the release of FancyProduct 3.0 – now you can filter your charts to only show unreleased versions and all the tasks devoted to it. That means you can get granular reporting on what is coming down the pipeline and sweep away irrelevant tasks from your dashboard.

You can also add in gadgets like activity stream, which provides a feed of all the updates happening within an instance, or create a pie chart displaying assignee workload so you can see who is overloaded.

It would also be silly not to highlight the use of being able to see “Time in Status” – which does exactly what it says and displays how long each issue had a specific status across a project.

Don’t be afraid to go beyond the basics and give your team a new edge – just be careful not to throw too many gadgets around and clutter up the dashboard.

Conclusion

Data visualization is at its most effective when you follow the best hygiene rules when building your charts and dashboards.

Remember: Treat your data like a story that you are telling. There are main characters and plot points you want to focus on, but a bit of color and side characters can do wonders if they don’t detract from your central plot.

If you want accessible and exciting reporting tools made easy, we’ve got just the thing for you. You have all the tools and features above to craft great stories from your data in record time with Custom Charts for Jira – including templates, simple ways to select your chart type, minimal to no coding, and ways to do it all in just a few clicks.

Create comprehensive and colorful charts in minutes, track all the metrics you want, and play with data your way. 

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