Epic Panel Capability for other Level 1 Issue Types

[Mark Livingstone]

We are currently on a very large instance of Jira DC v 9.12.10 that is used by many 1000's of teams across the company.

For some of our teams, we've recently adopted SAFe and had the Jira admins create new issue types to support our needed hierarchy ("Portfolio Epic" --> "Feature" --> "Story" --> "SubTask") and updated the issue type hierarchy to place "Feature" at the same level (level 1) as the out of the box "Epic" issue type.

We'd like the "Feature" issue type to work like "Epic" does to appear in the Epic panel on the backlog tab of our Sprint board but the "Epic Status" and "Epic Name" fields shows as locked and can not be assigned to the new "Feature" issue type.

We've been told this was solved in Cloud where new issue types can be created to act like the "Epic" level, but has anyone solved this in DC?

[Mercy]

In Jira Data Center, the “Epic panel” on the backlog is hard‑coded to display only issues of the system Epic type. The Epic Name and Epic Status fields are tied to that type and locked because they drive the legacy epic functionality in Jira Software, including the color labels, Epic Link relationship, and panel rendering. That’s why placing your “Feature” issue type at the same hierarchy level doesn’t automatically make it behave like an Epic. Jira Cloud’s custom hierarchy levels and issue type configuration for hierarchy (introduced with Advanced Roadmaps) are not available in Data Center for the board UI itself—only for portfolio planning views.