Quick start

From installation to your first working board in five minutes. This guide walks through creating a board, setting up columns, choosing card fields, and applying a filter.

Open BetterBoard

BetterBoard lives inside each Jira space. To open it:

1. Navigate to any Jira space in your instance
2. In the horizontal navigation bar, click the + button at the far right
3. Find and click BetterBoard in the list
4. BetterBoard opens with a welcome screen on your first visit

If you don’t see BetterBoard in the list, make sure it has been installed and that you have at least Space Member access. See the Installation guide for details.

Create your first board

1. Click New board in the board switcher at the top left
2. Give the board a name — something descriptive like “Sprint board” or “All open work”
3. Choose Shared if your whole team should see it, or Private if it’s just for you
4. Click Create

The board opens immediately with default settings — work items grouped by status, using the space’s standard columns.

You can create as many boards as you need. Common setups include one board per team workflow (sprint planning, triage, review) and one shared board with saved filters for each team member.

Configure columns

Columns are controlled by a grouping field — by default, Status.

1. Click Display (settings icon) in the toolbar
2. Under Columns, choose the field to group by: Status, Priority, Assignee, Sprint, or any single-select custom field
3. Map the available field options to the columns you want visible on the board

You can create new columns, rename existing ones, remove columns you don’t need, and drag column headers to reorder them. Removing a column simply hides that value from the board — it doesn’t delete any work items.

Choose what appears on cards

Cards show the fields you choose — nothing more, nothing less. To configure:

1. Click Display (settings icon) in the toolbar
2. Go to Fields
3. Add any field from the Available fields list to Fields in view
4. Click the blue Save button that appears in the toolbar to apply your changes

Keep cards lean for a quick visual scan, or add more fields when your team needs richer context at a glance. You can always adjust later without losing any other board configuration.

Apply a filter

Filters let you focus the board on specific work items:

1. Click the Filter button in the toolbar to open the filter bar
2. Choose a field (e.g. Assignee), pick an operator (e.g. is), and select a value — the board updates live
3. Click the blue Save button in the toolbar to save the filter with the board

You can stack multiple filters — for example, Assignee is “Me” AND Sprint is “Current sprint” AND Priority is not “Low”. All active filters are shown in the filter bar. Remove a filter by clearing its value.

Next steps

You now have a working board. From here, explore the features that make BetterBoard most useful for your team’s workflow.

• Multi-Space Boards
• Status Mapping
• Keyboard Shortcuts