Sub-goal to Key results

[Nick de Palézieux]

Hi

We're using Atlassian Goals to track our OKRs. Our goal types are set to OKRs.

We have company level OKRs and team-level OKRs. We want to set the company key results as the parent for each team-level objective.

This is important as we need to see which company key results have teams working towards them.

It looks like we can't do this right now, we can only select objectives (goals) as parents for objectives.

Is there a way to do this?

[Prasanna Ravichandran]

Hi,

We’re also moving toward stricter OKR adoption in our organization from the next quarter (currently in transition), and we explored a similar requirement.

At the moment, Atlassian Goals supports hierarchy mainly at the **goal/objective level**, so key results themselves can’t be set as parents of other goals. You can link team objectives to company objectives, but not directly to individual company key results.

Common workarounds include:

* Linking team objectives to the parent company objective and referencing the specific key result in the description
* Using labels/tags or custom naming conventions to indicate alignment to a particular KR
* Tracking detailed KR ownership in an external dashboard if needed

Currently there isn’t a native way to model KR → Objective hierarchy directly.

Hope this helps 👍

[Greg D]

I have seen other people I work with ask about this too. Conceptually, is this just a preference thing? Could everyone operate by only nesting Objectives and having the success metrics on those (in this case "Key Results")? Should we all stop thinking of Key Results as a parent and instead just map work items to them to drive metric value changes that then give a clear picture for someone to write an update on the Objective?

I'm trying to think through what the best practice should be around this. Is Atlassian's setup too rigid or have preferences generated too much appetite for unusual OKR structures? I definitely don't have an answer here and just trying to start the conversation.