Themes, Initiatives, and Goals?

[jengoree]

If you have an issue hierarchy with Themes and Initiatives and are also using the Goals feature in Jira, how do you define what Themes and Initiatives are versus what Goals are?

Atlassian recommends the Theme/Initiative/Epic hierarchy for managing work. They describe initiatives as 'collections of epics that drive towards a goal'.

But Jira Cloud has a new Goals feature. Goals are described as "outcomes that multiple projects or streams of work contribute to. Goals usually take a longer period of time to achieve, and can be represented by various frameworks, such as OKRs, KPIs, SMART goals, and more."

Individual work items/issues can be mapped to Goals, and Goals integration is available in Jira Plans so work in a plan can be viewed/sorted according to a Goal.

Given the availability of Goals, what should Themes and Initiatives be?

(I have read Margo Sakova's post on OKRs, but if you are using Goals or the issue hierarchy for OKRs, what is the other for?)