What is OKR Roadmap, and How It Helps Manage Your Business

Objectives and Key Results (or OKRs) are a powerful project management framework that improves engagement, responsibility, and transparency across the organization. That said, it is not a silver bullet and can not completely fix the alignment issues on large projects, where the sheer scale produces thought inertia and prevents people from being aware of what everyone else is doing. Some people try to solve this problem by replacing OKR with Roadmaps and other tools, but this is not an “OKR vs Roadmap” situation. In fact, there’s a way to combine those tools into an OKR Roadmap.

In this article, you are going to learn:

• The Basics of OKRs and Roadmaps
• Why OKRs need Roadmaps
• How to use OKR Roadmaps
• How to create an OKR Roadmap
• The Best Tools for OKR Roadmaps

The Basics of OKR and Roadmap

You probably already know about OKRs and Roadmaps — they are fairly popular as project management tools. That said, in case you need a quick reminder or maybe an ELI5, let’s get down to basics.

If you want more detailed breakdowns of OKRs and Roadmaps, check out our other guides!

The Basics of OKRs

OKRs provide a clear vision of what you want to achieve (the Objective) and specific, measurable steps to know if you’re getting there (the Key Results).

For example, imagine you want to build a treehouse in your backyard. These would probably be your OKRs.

• Objectives: This is the big, exciting idea you want to achieve. In the treehouse example, the objective would be:
• [O] Build a treehouse.
• Key Results: These are specific, measurable steps that help you achieve your objective. They tell you how to know if you’re getting closer to your goal. For the treehouse, key results might include:
• [KR1] Buy all the necessary materials by next weekend.
• [KR2] Finish the base of the treehouse in two weeks.
• [KR3] Complete the entire treehouse in a month.

Of course, your OKRs will have more Objectives in business, and Key Results are sometimes not as easy to define, but we hope you get the basic idea. If you’d like a slightly deeper dive into the OKRs, the history of OKRs, and the overall impact the framework can have on your business, check out our What is OKR in Business crash course on YouTube. It’s great.

The Basics of Roadmaps

A Roadmap is a detailed plan or the path you’ll follow to build your treehouse. The roadmap should include:

• Timeline: A roadmap includes a timeline that shows when different parts of the project will be completed. It’s like a guide that helps you know what to do and when.
• Milestones: These are significant steps or achievements along the way. For the treehouse, a milestone might be “Finish the roof.”
• Dependencies: Sometimes, specific steps depend on others being completed first. In the treehouse example, you can’t put the roof on until the walls are up.
• Resources: The roadmap also tells you what tools, materials, and help from friends or family you might need.
• Potential Roadblocks: It helps to think ahead about what might go wrong or slow you down, so you can be ready to deal with those challenges.

There, now you know what you need to do to have the most awesome treehouse on your street! And you also know how to use OKRs and roadmaps to manage small projects. When it comes to a corporate roadmap, the most popular one is the Gauntt chart. You’ve probably seen one before, but here’s an example anyway.

An example of an essential project roadmap. Source: Wikipedia

Now, that’s a very simple roadmap, and it actually lacks quite a lot of important information. If you want to get a better idea of the scope that a corporate Roadmap might reach, check out this one, from Jira Advanced Roadmaps:

A Jira Advanced Roadmap used by OKR Board for Jira development team

OKRs and Roadmaps Combined

So, OKRs give you a clear idea of what you want to achieve and how you’ll know when you’re getting there, while a roadmap is a detailed plan that helps you understand the steps, timeline, and resources you’ll need to reach your goal.

Put simply:

• The purpose of OKRs is to help you determine what you want to achieve and how to measure success.
• The purpose of roadmaps is to create a detailed plan for how you’ll get there.

These two tools work great together, complementing each other and lifting a huge burden off the shoulders of any project manager. That said, why use two tools when you can use one?

Let’s talk about OKR Roadmaps.

What is an OKR Roadmap and Why You Should Use It

An OKR Roadmap combines your Objective and Key Result (OKR) completion rates with your conventional roadmap, providing you with more information about your project and the challenges it faces.

Here’s a practical illustration of what an OKR project looks like in the OKR Board for Jira:

Source: OKR Roadmap in OKR Board for Jira by Oboard

Having information about both your goals and your plan to get them done in one single tool is invaluable, since it allows you to understand your project better. Here’re some examples of how an OKR Roadmap can help you.

OKR Roadmaps Help With Planning

An OKR Roadmap is a central reference point for your business. Whether it’s top-tier management or the newest recruit, an OKR Roadmap helps everyone in the company (department, team, etc.) know the primary objectives and their role in achieving them. This transparency eliminates guesswork and helps understand the workload people face.

For example, on the screenshot above, you could quickly assess that Julia has her hands full for the quarter, while Malcolm and Demian may be more available for non-OKR tasks. So if additional tasks are not listed on the OKR Roadmap but still need doing, they should be brought to Malcolm and Demian. Probably Demian, since Malcolm’s OKRs could be looking better.

OKR Roadmaps Help You Measure Performance

One of the biggest challenges for businesses is performance evaluation. Traditional metrics often only offer a superficial understanding. With an OKR Roadmap, you can see not only whether the objective was achieved but check how much progress has been made and under what circumstances.

For example, in the image above, you can see that Julia is swamped — and that’s why her task to reduce the number of customer-reported issues is probably falling by the wayside. On the other hand, Malcolm is less busy, yet his automated code testing is failing without a good reason and might require an investigation into blockers that prevent him from completing the task.

OKR Roadmaps Keep You Agile

In the fast-paced business world, rigidity means death. Objectives should often be revised, and key results should be re-evaluated based on real-time feedback and changing dynamics. A business should not just be sticking to a plan for the sake of it but should continuously be optimizing for the best outcomes.

With OKR Roadmaps, you get a warning on upcoming crises — at least internal ones. For example, let’s once again refer to the image above. We have already determined that Malcolm failed to complete his task. There may be many reasons for this, but the point here is that we have to plan around it if we want to still release on time — and we know this because we see it on the OKR Roadmap.

In addition, we may have a hint on how to salvage the situation. Why not take Demian, who has less on his plate, and have him help with Malcolm’s tasks for some time — maybe we can still catch up and achieve our key result!

Now, all of this could be achieved with traditional project management tools — but in more time and with much higher effort. The real power of OKR Roadmaps lies in the fact that you can manage your project at a glance, with always relevant data, and without spending hours of work lining up reports beforehand.

And that’s not all — these are just some benefits of implementing an OKR Roadmap inside a department. But we can do better — why not implement an OKR Roadmap for an entire project? Or maybe the entire company, allowing projects to interact with each other on a completely different level?

Cross-project OKR Roadmaps and the power they can bring to your organization deserve a separate article with an expert deep dive. Expect it soon, and for now — let’s get back to basics.

Biggest Challenges with OKR Roadmaps

To recap, OKRs define what an organization wants to achieve and how they will measure progress toward those goals. At the same time, roadmaps lay out the timeline and pathway to reach those objectives. Fusing these two concepts into an OKR Roadmap creates a powerful instrument for strategic planning, guiding an organization.

OKR Roadmaps align OKR Strategic Planning with everyday actions. They serve as a bridge between the company’s vision and the specific steps needed to realize that vision. What all of this means is that OKR Roadmap is not a silver bullet and requires quite a bit of employee buy-in to become a helpful tool. It is useless if:

• Your OKRs are defined poorly. There are a lot of ways to screw up OKRs. For example, you could map out all your work as OKRs — and never get any of it done. Or you could create an overambitious set of OKRs that simply can not be completed — so no work gets done, since why bother?
• Your employees ignore their OKRs. If people don’t care about their OKRs and just go about their routine work, the roadmap is essentially useless — since how can you track progress when no progress is being made?
• People do not track their progress correctly. It is very easy to get lost in the work and forget about tracking your progress. If the work is being done, but it is not being tracked, other team members can not easily see your contribution, and that’s bad — especially if their work depends on yours.

Finally, you need to ensure that your employees know how to use an OKR Roadmap — otherwise, they might not completely understand all the value this tool brings to the team. And yes, it may sound obvious, but human factors ruin a lot of great ideas — so let’s ensure we can minimize them. For example, with the basic OKR training provided by Oboard and agiledrive.

How to Create an Effective OKR Roadmap

For this section, we assume you already know how to write, align, and break down OKRs. If this is new to you, or if you need a refresher, check out our deep dive into OKR Alignment and Breakdown — it’s a long read, but it will help you avoid many mistakes.

So, let’s assume that you already have SMART OKRs that you want to project onto the roadmap. Let’s reuse our OKR from the article above and see how we can do that:

• [O] Start sales traction in ‘Q1 2023
• [KR] Sell 3 CRM Solutions
• [O1-CRM] Improve the CRM Solution
• [KR1-CRM] Reduce maintenance cost by 20%
• [KR2-CRM] Release the Customer Interaction History module
• [KR3-CRM] Release a mobile version of CRM for iOS
• [O1-SAL] Start sales traction for the CRM Solution
• [KR1-SAL] Sell 3 CRM solutions
• [KR2-SAL] Amend the sales pitch and campaign, promoting new CRM features

Now that the OKR part is done, let’s remember how we built our treehouse at the beginning of the article and follow through with the roadmap creation steps.

• Timeline: We are bound by the end of Q12023 to complete our two Key Results. Therefore, our time scale is three months.
• Milestones: We can roughly separate our Key Results into two parts — those that directly contribute to the completion of the Objectives and those that set up the direct contributors and make them possible. So let’s have a Milestone, “Preparation Complete.” It will include KR2-CRM, KR3-CRM, and KR2-SAL, indicating that we are done setting things up and can begin selling our product.
• Dependencies: Before the Sales team can complete KR1-SAL, they will need the new sales pitch and campaign indicated by KR2-SAL. So KR1-SAL depends on KR2-SAL and can not be completed without it.
• Resources: This project has access to the CRM development team and the Sales team. It would be wise to ensure that everyone is involved at every stage to a similar level, easing the pressure on the other team members.
• Potential Roadblocks: Since this is a very simple example, it doesn’t contain any inherent roadblocks as long as all the work is completed. However, you could still try to plan for such issues — for example, consider a potential price reduction if a superior competing product enters the CRM market.

Once all of this is done, you can restructure your Roadmap, and end up with something like this:

Source: OKR Board for Jira by Oboard

Now all that’s left is to link up these OKRs with the corresponding JIRA Issues to automate OKR tracking — and that’s where OKR Board for Jira truly shines.

OKR Roadmaps in OKR Board for Jira

There aren’t many OKR tools that support OKR roadmaps — after all, this is still a pretty experimental and underdeveloped concept. That said, OKR Board for Jira is always at the forefront of OKR framework development — and as you’ve seen above, our OKR Roadmaps are pretty great.

If you set up your OKR Roadmap with OKR Board for Jira, you are getting two major benefits not found in any other tool.

1. Reach across Projects, Departments, and Workspaces. You’ve got teams that are using a separate Jira workspace from yours? No problem. They can still collaborate with you on the same Roadmap that will link to issues in both workspaces.
2. Live editing directly from the Roadmap. Need to extend the deadline quickly? Just drag its progress bar on the roadmap, and voila! You can also promptly correct any embarrassing typos in the KR titles — just double-click and type. All the changes are automatically synced with your current OKRs and linked Jira Issues.

That is, of course, in addition to the general benefits OKR Board for Jira brings — like Customizable OKR Dashboards, one-click executive reports, deep Confluence integration, custom OKR weights, and many others. It is the #1 tool for OKR implementation on the Jira marketplace for many reasons — and our OKR Roadmaps are one of them!

Conclusion

In conclusion, successfully managing business objectives requires precise alignment and effective tracking, and integrating OKRs with roadmaps is a powerful tool to do just that. OKR Roadmaps clarify objectives, provide real-time insights into team OKR performance, and let you check their alignment with organizational goals.

With OKR Board for Jira, these processes are streamlined and automated, offering a unique and efficient approach to achieving your strategic goals. Try OKR Board for Jira today and revolutionize your approach to project management — or sign up for OKR consulting and coaching to get expert OKR training!

P.S. In case you’re not ready to commit to a dedicated OKR tool, check our ultimate guide on configuring Jira OKRs for free.