Creating and Editing Objectives

Utilizing Objectives

Cascading Objectives (Connecting & Visualizing)

Metrics

Key Results

The Strategy feature enables you to set clear objectives to empower your team and stakeholders, guide decision-making and create trackable measures of success.

Account admins and editors are able to create new company and team-specific objectives. They're also able to add descriptions and associate the objectives with a label color. When it comes to the label colors, our best practice is to associate company-wide objectives with a specific color, and then each team will have a different specific color, as well. We highly recommend adding a description to each of these objectives. Provide context and define what these objectives mean.

You have the ability to archive and unarchive objectives. The strategy homepage will have the option to toggle between Active and Archived. To archive an objective, you'll click into the specific objective and click the storage box in the upper right hand corner (Archive). This will move the objective from the Active homepage to Archived. You can also reverse engineer this process and unarchive an objective in a similar fashion.

Only a user with edit access to an objective can archive or unarchive it. You can still edit an archived objective, but you can’t connect to opportunities, bars or containers. In an archived state, you can still remove an objective from a bar, container or opportunity.

You can apply a RAG (red, amber, green) status to objectives to denote the level of risk associated with that specific objective. At a glance, you're able to see how an objective is tracking alongside key results and roadmap items progress. From the homepage, your audience will be able to filter based on this risk status.

All created objectives will be visible to account members. Admins can create, edit and delete objectives. Editors are able to create and edit the objectives created by themselves.

To edit an objective, visit your strategy page and click the Edit icon in the top righthand corner. The first time accessing this page will have a ProductPlan-generated example.

Account objectives should be applicable to the entire account as this level of objectives will be consistent across your full ProductPlan account. To get started, we recommend between 3 and 6 objectives for your organization.

In addition to setting objectives at the account level, there's also the option to set team-level objectives. You're able to filter the objectives overview page by either the company or team level. The strategy overview page will now have a filter, and it will also display team names on OKR cards.

Within a roadmap, users will be able to see associated teams when selecting objectives for a bar. You can assign multiple teams to a single objective as needed.

ProductPlan offers the ability to cascade Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) throughout different levels of your organization. This feature allows you to connect high-level company objectives with team-specific goals, ensuring alignment across your entire organization. Cascading is only available to professional and enterprise customers.

Cascading OKRs in ProductPlan is achieved through parent-child relationships between objectives. You can establish these connections when creating a new objective or by editing an existing one. To create or modify these connections, you must be the editor of the objective being modified or an account admin. It's important to note that while an objective can have multiple child objectives, it can only have one parent objective. This structure helps maintain clear lines of alignment and accountability. Child relationships do not impact calculations in their parent’s metrics.

When managing connections between objectives, you have the flexibility to remove a parent connection if needed. This can be done by opening the edit mode on the child objective and removing the connection. In cases where a parent objective is deleted, its children automatically become parents of their own lineages, preserving the overall structure of your OKRs. Archived objectives maintain their existing relationships but are not available as options when selecting new parent objectives, ensuring that only active objectives are used in ongoing planning.

ProductPlan provides a clear and intuitive way to visualize the relationships between objectives. On the objective details page, you'll find parent objectives displayed prominently above the Opportunities section. Child objectives are conveniently located below the Key Results section, providing a comprehensive view of how objectives are interconnected.

Each objective card within these sections offers valuable information at a glance. You'll see the objective's title, associated team(s), progress on correlated key results and roadmap items. To dive deeper into any connected objective, simply click on its card to view its full details. Additionally, the Strategy index provides an easy way to gauge the scope of each objective by indicating the number of children associated with it.

Roadmap editors will need to add the Strategy field to their individual roadmap (similar to custom text and dropdown fields). Adding the field is done under Settings and Fields. Once Fields is selected from the lefthand menu, the editor will then choose the strategy objective (account or team level) from the dropdown menu. If the field is being used at the roadmap level, any editor can assign an objective value to a bar and/or container.

To add the objective to a bar and/or container, click into the initiative on the roadmap. Once in the bar, click the strategy dropdown and select the appropriate company objective.

You can filter by objectives and create customized views or list layouts based on objective values. This can be a great way to visualize all bars/containers that have a common objectives across roadmaps into a single view.

To create a list view by objective, begin by clicking +Add New View from the roadmap title dropdown. You'll then title your view, add a description and select bar & font size. Under the Layout tab, the next step is to select List View and from the Style dropdown, select your objective field shown with the bullseye icon.

This process will generate the custom list view by objective.

You're able to generate a reporting metric to see how the team is progressing toward an objective. The progress report will show how many completed bars and/or containers are associated with each objective. Bars and containers are counted as complete when their end date falls before today’s date. The measurement is based on the initiative's end date.

As a second option, you can select percent complete of bars as an option for calculating the objective completion. The completion percentage will be an aggregate of all connected bars' completion.

With the Strategy framework, monitor your progress towards achieving your objectives with key results. For each objective you create, you can set unique key results to live alongside the delivery goals you've set at the roadmap level.

Learn more about how to create objectives & key results with this article here.

Note: This feature is not available for export.