When a property is set as a required conditional stage property for a specific pipeline stage (Settings → Objects → [object] → Pipelines → [pipeline] → stage → Conditional stage properties), it becomes permanently locked on that pipeline’s board card and cannot be removed — even via the “Edit for myself” card customisation, which returns: “This item is required, and cannot be deleted.”
The problem: stage-required properties are already enforced at the actual point they matter — when a record is dragged into the stage that requires them, HubSpot prompts the user to fill them in before the move completes. That enforcement doesn’t depend on the property being listed on the card. But the card editor treats “required somewhere in this pipeline” as “must be visible on every card, in every stage, permanently” — which is a much broader restriction than the enforcement point justifies.
In practice, this means a property that’s only relevant at one stage of a pipeline permanently occupies one of the limited default card property slots (four for account-wide “Edit for everyone” setup) across the entire pipeline, with no way to reclaim that space.
Request: Decouple the two mechanisms. Let admins remove a property from the board card display while it remains a required conditional stage property — the drag-and-drop stage-transition prompt should remain the actual enforcement point, not the property’s presence on the card.
Secondary issue to flag in the same report: when this restriction blocks a save via “Edit for everyone,” the error returned is a generic “There was a problem updating card settings. Please refresh the page and try again” — which gives no indication of the actual cause. The “Edit for myself” flow, by contrast, catches the same restriction upfront with a clear, specific message. Recommend aligning the two so “Edit for everyone” fails with the same clear explanation instead of a generic error.
Steps to reproduce:
- Mark a property as a required conditional stage property for one stage of a pipeline.
- Go to the board view for that pipeline → configure icon → Board settings → Card setup → Edit (For myself) → Properties.
- Attempt to remove that property from the card → blocked with “This item is required, and cannot be deleted.”
- Repeat via “For everyone” instead → the removal appears to succeed in the editor, but fails silently on Save with a generic error.
Update / correction to the above
Since posting this, I’ve tested further and my original diagnosis was wrong — correcting it rather than leaving a misleading report up.
I’d assumed the card was locked because the property in question was a required conditional stage property for one of our pipeline stages, and that HubSpot was tying board-card visibility to that requirement. I’ve since tried removing a different property that has no such requirement attached, and hit exactly the same block — same message, same behaviour. So that theory doesn’t hold up. “Required” in “This item is required, and cannot be deleted” doesn’t appear to mean the property needs a value on the record; it seems to just mean “part of the account-wide ‘For everyone’ default set,” which personal (“For myself”) customisation can reorder and add to, but never remove from.
Revised understanding, and what I’d actually like addressed:
-
The wording is misleading. “This item is required, and cannot be deleted” reads as a data-completeness rule, when it’s actually a structural one — personal customisation simply can’t remove anything from the admin-set base list. Something like “This property is part of the account-wide default and can’t be removed from your personal view” would point people at the real cause instead of sending them down a data-requirements rabbit hole, as it did me.
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The “For everyone” save failure looks like an unflagged permissions issue, not a system fault. I’m not a Super Admin. I can open the “For everyone” editor, remove a property, add a replacement, and the UI lets me go through the motions — but Save fails with a generic “There was a problem updating card settings. Please refresh the page and try again.” If that’s a silent rejection because Super Admin is required to save this particular change, it should either be blocked before I’m allowed to start editing, or the error should say so directly, rather than presenting as an unexplained fault.
Apologies for the false start — hopefully this saves the next person the same detour.
Update / correction to the above
Since posting this, I’ve tested further and my original diagnosis was wrong — correcting it rather than leaving a misleading report up.
I’d assumed the card was locked because the property in question was a required conditional stage property for one of our pipeline stages, and that HubSpot was tying board-card visibility to that requirement. I’ve since tried removing a different property that has no such requirement attached, and hit exactly the same block — same message, same behaviour. So that theory doesn’t hold up. “Required” in “This item is required, and cannot be deleted” doesn’t appear to mean the property needs a value on the record; it seems to just mean “part of the account-wide ‘For everyone’ default set,” which personal (“For myself”) customisation can reorder and add to, but never remove from.
Revised understanding, and what I’d actually like addressed:
-
The wording is misleading. “This item is required, and cannot be deleted” reads as a data-completeness rule, when it’s actually a structural one — personal customisation simply can’t remove anything from the admin-set base list. Something like “This property is part of the account-wide default and can’t be removed from your personal view” would point people at the real cause instead of sending them down a data-requirements rabbit hole, as it did me.
-
The “For everyone” save failure looks like an unflagged permissions issue, not a system fault. I’m not a Super Admin. I can open the “For everyone” editor, remove a property, add a replacement, and the UI lets me go through the motions — but Save fails with a generic “There was a problem updating card settings. Please refresh the page and try again.” If that’s a silent rejection because Super Admin is required to save this particular change, it should either be blocked before I’m allowed to start editing, or the error should say so directly, rather than presenting as an unexplained fault.
Apologies for the false start — hopefully this saves the next person the same detour.
Hi @Ougadougou, This is a really clean writeup, the distinction between where enforcement should happen (the stage transition prompt) versus where it currently happens (permanently locking the card slot) is the actual bug here, not just a nice to have. The silent failure on “Edit for everyone” versus the clear error on “Edit for myself” is also worth flagging as a separate defect on its own, that inconsistency alone would confuse anyone hitting it without your reproduction steps. Have you tried working around it by removing the conditional requirement first, adjusting the card, then re-adding the requirement? Or does the lock persist even through that sequence?