customizing Stakeholders's setting so that they can only see the shared dashboard in Azure Devops!

hi rebornlately​ adding some more points on top of Kidd_Ip​ , Firstly, its great question — this is a common need when you want to give executives, auditors, or clients limited visibility in Azure DevOps without exposing sensitive details like Assigned To or backlog-level information.

Unfortunately, Stakeholder access level in Azure DevOps has limited customization options — it’s designed for basic visibility across work items, dashboards, and queries, not fine-grained control. However, you can still achieve your goal with a combination of security group permissions and custom dashboards.

Understand Stakeholder access limitations:

By default, users with the Stakeholder access level can:

View dashboards (if shared with them)

View work items and boards (in read-only mode)

Cannot edit or create items (read-only)

However, they can still see the "Assigned To" field and backlog items if they have project-level read access. Azure DevOps doesn’t provide a field-level security model for built-in fields like Assigned To.

Use Security Permissions to Restrict Access

You can restrict Stakeholders from viewing boards and backlogs by modifying security group permissions:

Go to Project Settings → Boards → Area Paths

For the Area Path in question, set:

View work items in this node → Deny for the Stakeholders group.

This prevents them from seeing the backlog, boards, and queries associated with those work items.

They will still be able to see shared dashboards, since dashboards are controlled separately.

Share dashboards explicitly