Is it possible to link one epic to multiple features in Jira?

[Abbas Khwaja]

Our team is looking to show our entire work under specific Features. However, we have team members who work on Features owned by other team. In order for us to show our team's complete work effort we would like to have Epics that are linked to Features owned by other teams to show under our Feature. Is it possible to link those Epics to both, Features that are owned by other teams and our Feature, to show it under our work?

[Anahit Sukiasyan]

Dear @Abbas Khwaja

Welcome to the Community!

Jira does not natively allow an issue (e.g., an Epic) to belong to multiple parent issues (e.g., Features) if you’re using standard hierarchy setups (like Jira Advanced Roadmaps). However, there are some workarounds, you can try as below:

A. Use Issue Links:

• Create Links Between Epics and Features: Link the Epics owned by other teams' Features to your Feature using Jira's "Linked Issues" functionality.
  • Example: Use link types like "relates to" or "is a child of" to establish a connection.
  • These links will provide visibility but won’t show up in native hierarchy reports (like Advanced Roadmaps).

B. Use Custom Fields:

• Add a custom field (e.g., "Secondary Feature") to the Epics to track association with both your Feature and the original Feature.
• You can use this field to filter and report on Epics associated with your team’s Features.

C. Tags or Labels:

• Apply a unique label or custom tag to the Epics that contribute to your Feature, even if they are primarily linked to Features owned by other teams.

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Abbas Khwaja

just to add to @Anahit Sukiasyan's great answer:

The downside of these approaches is that Jira doesn't understand any of these as parent/child relationships, and therefore doesn't give you many (if any) hierarchy-related features. If that's something that you might be interested in, you may want to check out the options available on the Atlassian Marketplace.

E.g., I believe that your use case could be solved very nicely using the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira. 

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a number of advanced features, including the support for configurable issue hierarchies. These issue hierarchies can be based on Jira's built-in parent/child relationships, and/or based on issue links of configurable issue link types, or any default or custom fields. You can have as many issue hierarchies configured as you want, and easily switch between them.

This is how it looks in action; pay attention to epic WORK-142:

Depending on your configuration, it's either a child of OKR-1, or a child of initiative WORK-161. Our epic is connected to both of them via issue links. 

This would work on any hierarchy level and with any number of hierarchy levels. You can also also combine issue hierarchies with JXL's other advanced features, such as sum-ups, conditional formatting, or inline bulk editing via copy/paste.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Abbas Khwaja 

This depends.

Are you running Jira on-prem or in Cloud.

On on-prem you will have Advanced Roadmap and on Cloud (depending on the tier you are on) you will have Plans if on a Premium or higher tier.

Otherwise you have the option to use an app from the marketplace that provides portfolio options.