How to show a custom field (Department) inline on the backlog issue cards?

[Leonard S]

TL;DR: Trying to show our custom field Department inline on the backlog issue cards — without losing the compact one-line layout. 

Hi everyone,

In our IT department we recently decided to start using Epics to represent projects with a clear scope (a defined start and end) — instead of using them to indicate a department (like Finance, HR, or Education).

This new approach works well for roadmap visibility and reporting, but it has one drawback:
in the product backlog, it’s now harder to distinguish issues by department.

I’ve tried a few things to make this clearer for our team:

• Using card colors based on the Department field → works, but not very readable

• Adding a Quick Filter for each department → filters too aggressively; people still want to see all issues at once

• Prefixing the summary with [Finance], [HR], etc. → works technically, but feels like a workaround

• Adding the Department field to the card layout → technically works, but causes each issue card in the backlog to take up two lines, which makes the view less compact and harder to scan

Screenshot of product backlog with card colors; summary with [Department]; Department field on second line: people in my team find it hard to distinguish 'their' department tickets in this view.  

What we’d really like is to display the value of our custom field “Department” directly on the issue cards in the backlog — ideally on the same line as the summary, between the title and the status: 

Screenshot of former view, in which we used Department as Epic/parents. People in my team find it easy to distinguish 'their' department tickets in this view.  

Setup details:

• Jira Cloud (company-managed project)

• Scrum board view

• Custom field: Department (single select)

• Using Epics as parents (via the Parent field), not the deprecated Epic Link field

• Goal: improve backlog visibility without cluttering cards or filtering out issues

Has anyone found a clean way to achieve this (natively or via an Atlassian Marketplace app)?

Thanks in advance for any tips or examples!

— Leonard

[John Funk]

Hi Leonard,

There is no way to do that which I am aware of. 

[Rudy Holtkamp]

Only possibility is to use the workaround by prefixing the summary.