How to Implement OKRs in Jira: A Practical Guide for Beginners

OKRs are the definitive goal-setting and strategy execution framework — however, it is not enough. You can have the most amazing goals in the world, but if your day-to-day work is not built around them, you will never achieve your goals.

By integrating OKRs with Jira, you and your team can bridge this gap between the strategy and day-to-day execution. For example, you can link Issues, Epics, and Sprints to Key Results, which lets your team remain aligned with the company values and never lose focus of the main goals.

However, transforming your entire workflow like this is a tall order. So, in this article, we will cover why you should use Jira to manage OKRs and how to implement OKRs in Jira.

Why You Should Manage OKRs in Jira

Jira is a popular software platform built by Atlassian following Agile principles. It offers various features like setting priorities, attaching files, and integrating with other software tools, making managing complex projects easier. It also provides reporting tools to help teams evaluate their performance and make data-driven decisions.

OKR Board for Jira was designed to seamlessly integrate OKRs into Jira, to act as a strategic layer, and to bridge goal-setting with execution. It is the most popular OKR management software on the Jira marketplace, used by almost 3,000 customers from 50 countries and over 10,000 monthly active users.

Our software implements a strategic layer in Jira and allows you to connect Initiatives, Epics, and Issues directly to your OKRs. This way, team members are always aware of what they are doing, and we can also do OKR tracking in Jira by monitoring the Issue completion status.

By using OKR Board for Jira you are adding a strategic OKR layer to your Jira execution.

OKR Board for Jira is straightforward to set up, customize, and use. Here’s how it can help you track, manage, and report OKRs in Jira in 9 easy steps.

How to Manage OKRs in Jira

This guide will go step-by-step, showcasing the best way to set up OKRs using our OKR Board for Jira. To install the app, please go to the Atlassian Marketplace.

Step 1. Decide on Your OKR Intervals and Cadence

Intervals are OKR cycles in which you set, execute, and monitor your goals in a particular timeframe. They are fully customizable and can always be adjusted to your needs.

By default, OKR Board for Jira is set up to work on a quarterly cadence and comes with quarterly and yearly OKR Intervals. However, you can create your own if you wish to follow a different cadence.

Step 2. Define OKR Levels

OKR Levels allow you to create a custom hierarchy for your objectives based on your company structure.

By default, OKR Board for Jira is set up for a structure with three levels: Company, Group, and Personal. You can rename existing levels — for example, turn Group into Department — or create additional ones to represent your company’s hierarchy better.

NOTE: Our experience with OKRs shows that the best practice is to keep 3–5 OKR Levels. Having a higher number leads to a lot of busywork and compromises alignment. There are exceptions, of course, but we still recommend keeping them simple.

Step 3. Separate Team Members into Groups

OKR Board for Jira allows you to reflect your company’s structure and separate users into Groups. In Jira OKRs, Groups can represent departments, teams, or other organizational units inside your company that are united by the same goal.

With Groups, you can assign OKRs to their specific owner and to their entire unit — or even several units simultaneously to promote cross-department collaboration.

You can also use Groups as filters with OKR Board for Jira’s reporting tools, allowing you to quickly create reports focusing on a specific unit in your company.

Step 4. Create Objectives and Key Results

OKR is a goal-setting and strategy execution framework that helps organizations set, communicate, and track objectives and the measurable outcomes needed to achieve them.

NOTE: Taking a deep dive into the OKR framework is a bit out of scope for this article. To learn more about them, we recommend you start with OKRs: How John Doerr’s Formula Makes Companies Grow and continue with the OKR Alignment Guide. Alternatively, you can watch our 16-minute guide on YouTube.

In the most basic OKR definition, OKRs consist of two parts:

• The “Objective” is a clear, qualitative goal aligned with the organization’s strategic plan.
• The “Key Results” are specific, quantifiable metrics used to measure the progress toward that objective.

By providing a shared understanding of what success looks like, OKRs help teams stay focused and aligned. Here are some OKRs examples to illustrate the concept:

• [O] Increase market share in the Q4.
• [KR] Achieve $2 million in new customer sales.
• [KR] Onboard 10 new enterprise clients.
• [KR] Increase customer retention rate to 95%.

NOTE: To learn the best practices for designing OKRs, check out How to Write OKRs That Will Help You Succeed. To get more examples of OKRs in different industries, check out the OKR Examples category on Oboard Blog.

Step 5. Align Your Work in Jira with OKRs

One of the biggest benefits OKR Board for Jira brings is the ability to track OKRs in real-time by linking Epics and Tasks to Key Results. This allows for a clearer connection between strategy and execution.

You can have more than one Epic tied to the same Jira OKR. Moreover, you can use the weights system to define which Epic is more important for achieving the Key Result.

Step 6. Set Up an Executive and Team Dashboards

OKR Board for Jira has multiple ways to display OKRs — your Home page, OKR Roadmap, OKR Structure Map, etc. They are invaluable when you want to get a bird’s eye view of the project or your total responsibilities, but what if you want to focus on a select few instead?

Custom OKR Dashboards were designed to solve this issue. They allow you to select up to 10 Objectives and monitor them on a dedicated Dashboard, which can be shared with others. It can also be exported as a PDF in a single click and added to your executive report.

You can have multiple Dashboards for different reports — an Executive report dashboard, a Team dashboard that showcases the Atlassian OKRs you are focusing on this Sprint, etc.

To learn more, check out our feature article on Custom OKR Dashboards.

Step 7. Embed OKR reports into Confluence

While OKR Dashboards are great for monitoring and reporting, using them to log performance reviews is not the best idea. Especially when an alternative is integrated directly with your company’s Knowledge Base in Confluence.

OKR Board for Confluence is a free add-on to OKR Board for Jira that allows you to create Confluence OKR dashboards that will update in real-time. Using different Confluence OKR templates, you can tweak the display to present the data you need — and if one report is not enough, you can create an unlimited number of them.

Check out our feature article on OKR Board for Confluence to learn more about it.

Conclusion

Implementing OKRs in Jira is a powerful way to drive organizational performance, bridging your strategy and execution. To make it possible, you need OKR Board for Jira — our powerful OKR platform featuring automated progress tracking and reporting tools.

If you want to learn more about OKRs — consider signing up for Basic OKR Coaching with Oboard. This course features a lot of real-world examples and case studies that help you understand the logic behind OKRs and the best practices for implementing them.

Alternatively, click the button below and set up a demo for the OKR Board for Jira, where we will help you finetune your OKR process to your company’s needs and guide you through the entire OKR pipeline. And if you don’t like talking to people, grab a free 30-day trial of OKR Board for Jira and go wild!