One agent sees the card and another does not
Two people open the same request. One sees the customer, the other sees nothing at all: no empty box, no placeholder, no explanation. That silence is deliberate. Telling somebody they are not allowed to see a card would itself say something about the customer, so the app renders nothing rather than rendering a refusal.
It does mean there is no error message to work from, so the audience settings have to be read rather than observed.
#The floor that cannot be configured away
Before anything else, the app reads the request as the person looking at it. If Jira will not let them open it, the card shows nothing, and no audience setting can change that. On top of that, all three card placements are limited to signed-in users with Jira Service Management agent access on a service desk project. None of them is available to unlicensed or anonymous readers, so a portal customer never sees the card whatever is configured.
#The required project permission
Option | The hint on screen |
|---|---|
Agents in this project | "Anyone with agent access. This is the audience the customer card is for." This is the default. |
Anyone who can see the issue | "The widest option. Every licensed user who can browse this project sees the card." |
Project administrators only | "The narrowest option. Useful while you are still deciding what to show." |
Users who can manage sprints | "A team-lead shaped audience on projects that use it as one." |
The widest option is not as wide as it sounds. The three placements are gated on service management agent access before the Permissions tab is consulted at all. The setting narrows that audience; it cannot widen it. "Anyone who can see the issue" therefore does not in practice reach a licensed user without agent access on the project, and it never reaches a portal customer.
#A group restriction is AND, not OR
"Restrict to groups (optional)" takes "Jira group names, separated by commas. Leave this empty for no group restriction, which is the default: a group check costs a Jira call on the first render for each viewer." When it is filled in, the step is explicit about what it means: "A viewer now needs the permission above AND membership of one of these groups. Both, not either."
A misspelt group name hides the card from everybody. Group names are compared ignoring capitalisation and surrounding spaces, so Account-Managers and account-managers are the same group here. Nothing checks that the name exists in Jira, though. A name with a typo in it matches nobody, and because an excluded viewer sees nothing at all, the card quietly disappears for the whole project with no error anywhere.
#Changes do not all take effect at the same speed
Editing the audience or the group list in settings applies immediately.
A person's permission answer and their group membership are remembered for fifteen minutes, so somebody who loses access can keep seeing the card for up to that long, and somebody newly added to a group can wait the same fifteen minutes to gain it.
The check that guards the settings screens themselves is never remembered. It is asked of Jira on every action, so removing somebody's project administration takes effect at once.
If Jira cannot answer a permission or group question at all, because of a rate limit or an outage, the app treats it as a no for that render only and never stores the refusal. A card that vanished for one reader during an upstream wobble comes back on the next view.
#Everyone who passes sees everything
There is no per-person field hiding. The Permissions step says so and counts what it is protecting: "Everyone who passes this gate sees every attribute you chose on the previous step. Nothing on the card is hidden per person." If some fields are not for everybody, the answer is a narrower audience or fewer fields, not a finer-grained rule.
#A few things worth knowing
Two people can also differ because one of them is a project administrator. On a project whose setup is unfinished, administrators are shown which piece is missing and agents are shown nothing, which reads as one person having a card and the other not.
The same applies to a field Attio no longer returns: administrators get a small warning marker beside that label, agents never see it.
Removing somebody from a group in Jira does not take the card away from them straight away. Removing the group from the settings does.
#Related
No message is the message. Read the settings, not the screen.
