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?)

[Florian Bonniec]

Hi @jengoree 

Does this article help you ? https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-Align-articles/A-Crash-Course-on-Jira-Align-s-Core-Hierarchies/ba-p/1167395

This article as also been helpful for me 

https://www.atlassian.com/agile/agile-at-scale/okr

Regards

[Ariel Yadin]

@jengoree The framing that helped my team most: Goals are why you're doing work, Initiatives are what you're doing, and Epics are how. So an Initiative like 'Rebuild onboarding flow' links up to a Goal like 'Improve activation rate by Q3' — they're not the same layer, they're different levels of abstraction.

The tricky part you're hitting is that Atlassian's own docs blur this by saying initiatives 'drive towards a goal,' which implies they're nearly synonymous. They're not. Goals should be outcome-oriented and time-boxed (OKRs fit naturally here). Initiatives are delivery containers.

Where it gets messy in practice: Jira's native Goals feature still has real gaps: limited automation, no API access, and the hierarchy linkage in Plans feels half-baked. So teams end up either duplicating structure or abandoning Goals entirely and just using Initiatives as a proxy.

If you're seriously trying to run OKRs through this stack, it might be worth looking at Bazz OKR, which sits inside Jira and handles the Goal-to-Issue linkage more cleanly than the native feature currently does.

Happy to share how we structured the hierarchy if that would help.