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Setting Objectives

Set company objectives in ProductPlan to keep your team strategically aligned on your Product OKRs.

Nick Fields avatar
Written by Nick Fields
Updated over a week ago

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

Creating and Editing Objectives

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.

Utilizing Objectives

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.

Metrics

Number of Bars/Containers

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.

Percent Complete

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.

Key Results

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.

Note: This feature is not available for export.

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