What is Foundation?

Foundation is a project portfolio management (PPM) app for Jira Cloud. It lives inside Jira as a global page and lets you build saved, hierarchical views of your issues — called lenses — without moving any data out of Jira.

If you’ve ever wished Jira had a spreadsheet-style tree with inline editing, folders, and JQL-driven automation, Foundation is that tool.

What Foundation is for

• Portfolio rollups. Group Epics under Initiatives, Initiatives under Goals, across many projects.
• Cross-project planning. Pull issues from multiple Jira projects into one tree with custom grouping.
• Program reviews. Share a curated view with stakeholders who only need to see the top of the tree.
• Backlog grooming at scale. Inline-edit status, priority, assignee, sprint, and dates without opening each issue.

How it works

1. You create a lens — a saved hierarchical view.
2. You fill the lens with issues from Jira (added manually or automatically by Sync Agents that run JQL).
3. You organize rows using Flex Items (non-issue folders) and drag-and-drop.
4. You save column, sort, and filter settings as views, and share the lens with teammates.

All changes to Jira fields flow back to Jira. All changes made in Jira flow into Foundation via free event triggers, so the data stays current without burning API rate limits.

What makes Foundation different

• Built entirely on Atlassian Forge. Your data stays in your Atlassian tenant — no third-party servers, no extra vendors in your trust boundary.
• Hierarchy first. Every row has a parent. You can freely mix Jira issues and Flex Items at any depth.
• Server-centric rendering. The backend assembles a complete view and the frontend renders it. That means large lenses (up to 1,000 issues in the MVP) stay responsive.
• Refresh-on-open in MVP. When you open a lens, Foundation pulls the latest cached data from Jira. There’s no live mirror — your lens reflects the last refresh.

Related

• Install Foundation
• Your first lens
• Vocabulary