"I used to spend hours each week manually assembling status updates in native Jira and struggled to slice data dynamically, requiring exporting data and building spreadsheets by hand. But now, all of the dashboard gadgets update automatically across my boards."
Eric Lyke, Leader, Product Operations Strategy and Planning team, Cisco
Good Jira data is only half the job. Getting it in front of the right people, in a form they can actually use, is where the real work begins.
That was the reality for Eric Lyke and his team at Cisco. As leader of the Product Operations Strategy and Planning team, Eric oversees a group of 10 senior Jira admins managing the Atlassian stack for a production development organization of more than 15,000 users, running hundreds of programs and projects at any given time. The underlying data was solid. Presenting it usefully to audiences with very different needs was the harder problem.
As the scale and complexity of their programs grew, the native Jira dashboard experience had its limitations. Keeping up with the varied reporting needs of different stakeholder groups meant pulling data manually, building custom views, and rebuilding dashboards whenever requirements changed, adding up to hours of extra work every week just to keep the information moving.
How do you serve every stakeholder from a single Jira dashboard?
The challenge wasn't a Jira problem. Jira was doing its job. The gap was in how the data could be presented to audiences — software, hardware, program, and product management teams — with very different needs and very different levels of familiarity with Jira itself.
What the team needed was a way to serve all of those audiences from a single, maintainable set of dashboards. Building separate views for each group, or reaching outside their existing Atlassian environment for a new tool, wasn't the answer.
"Before Rich Filters, building a dashboard felt clunky and really hasn't changed much in a decade. And as anyone working in Jira knows, once you build one dashboard, there will be continual requests for updates. But with Rich Filters, it really is much easier to create and most importantly set up dashboards so they keep up with the new demands. It is so easy to keep adding changes. It's like a mixing board that you simply tune."
Eric Lyke, Leader, Product Operations Strategy and Planning team, Cisco
How Cisco found Rich Filters for Jira Dashboards
After exploring options on the Atlassian Marketplace, the team landed on Rich Filters for Jira Dashboards. Rich Filters is an Atlassian Marketplace app that extends Jira's native dashboard capabilities, making it easier to create interactive, customizable dashboards that help different audiences explore and understand Jira data. It lives inside Jira, so there is no new tool to learn and no parallel environment to maintain.
The team wasn't looking to add complexity. They wanted to get more from what they already had, and Rich Filters fit naturally inside the environment they'd already invested in. Setup required coordination with their ENG/IT team, and once that was complete, they were up and running without disrupting existing workflows.
What changed after Cisco deployed Rich Filters for Jira Dashboards
The improvements were incremental but meaningful. Dashboards became easier to read as pivot tables and structured layouts replaced dense data grids, making it much faster for anyone to get to the information that actually mattered, whether they were managing the program directly or sitting down for a stakeholder review. Stakeholders could explore data on their own, drilling into what was most relevant to them with dynamic filtering built directly into the dashboard. And rather than maintaining a separate view for each stakeholder group, the team could keep a smaller set of dashboards while still giving everyone what they needed.
And then something else happened.
"Since implementing Rich Filters, we have seen a surge in demand from other teams eager to leverage the tool for their own dashboarding needs."
Eric Lyke, Leader, Product Operations Strategy and Planning team, Cisco
The Product Operations team's dashboards didn't just solve their own reporting problem. They became a proof of concept for the rest of the organization.
Why organized Jira data leads to better stakeholder engagement
Rich Filters didn't change how Cisco's Product Operations team works in Jira. It changed how their work lands with the people who depend on it. When data is organized and easy to read, stakeholders engage with it differently — they ask better questions, program reviews move forward, and the value that was always in the data finally becomes visible to the people who need it most.
"For Atlassian admins evaluating filtering add-ons, Rich Filters is my top recommendation. Its ability to provide immediate, scalable improvements to dashboard reporting makes it an ideal fit for any organizational size."
Eric Lyke, Leader, Product Operations Strategy and Planning team, Cisco
For enterprise teams that have invested in Jira and want to get more from their existing data without adding complexity or a new tool, Rich Filters is a practical place to start.
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