how to skip a level of Hierachy as a parent - Child relationship within same project

Short version: native parent-child can't skip a level, so what you saw in your test is the expected behaviour rather than something you set up wrong.

Jira's hierarchy is a single ordered stack of levels - in your case Initiative > Feature > Epic > Story - and the Parent field only ever links an item to the level directly above it. So an Epic's parent can be a Feature, but not an Initiative while a Feature level sits in between. There's no concept of an "optional" level that some items skip and others use; the depth is uniform across the whole hierarchy.

A few ways people handle wanting that flexibility:

If the skip cases are occasional, the pragmatic move is to use an issue link instead of the parent for those - link the Epic to the Initiative with a normal link type (relates to, or a parent/child link). It represents the jump fine, with the caveat that it's a link and not a true parent, so it won't roll up in Plans or the timeline the way a real parent does.

If you genuinely need variable-depth trees as a first-class thing, that's the territory of a dedicated hierarchy/structure app from the Marketplace - those let you build arbitrary parent-child depth outside the fixed native levels.

And one sanity check worth doing: if Feature is something you end up skipping fairly often, that can be a sign it's better modelled as a grouping - a label, a component, or a field - rather than a hierarchy level. That keeps the native tree clean at Initiative > Epic > Story and still lets you tag the "feature" grouping wherever it actually applies.

If you tell me roughly how your teams plan day to day, I can point you at whichever of those fits best.

Hello and welcome to Atlassian community @Noopur Agarwal 

There's already open feature request related to that.

Summarizing this AI Wall of text from top, nope native it's no achievable.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-89913 

Best,

Arek 🤠 

Hi Noopur - There is actually a loophole that you might try to exploit with the hierarchy. You cannot create a work item manually and skip over a level in the hierarchy. But if you create the work item using an Automation flow, it will actually let you link to any level above it as the parent. The question becomes how would you identify the parent? Would it be a trigger work item? Would it be a hardcoded value like ABC-123, etc. So it depends on your use case. 

Hi @Noopur Agarwal ,

No, this isn't natively supported in Jira Cloud, and what you saw in your test is expected behavior, not a misconfiguration on your part. Jira's issue hierarchy (Advanced Roadmaps/Plans) is strictly level-based, not path-based. I have used Big Picture, which has its own "Structures"-like flexible tree separate from the native Jira hierarchy.

If you want to avoid an add-on, use a custom issue link type  like delivers or implements between Epic and Initiative when Feature is skipped. It won't show up in the native Roadmap/hierarchy view, but it will be query via JQL : issue in linkedIssues(...) and visible on the issue itself. The Parent field and any rollups/reporting that depend on it won't pick it up, though.

Thanks,

venkat