My OKRs Live in Another Tool. How Do I Actually Tie Jira Work to Them?

[#1]

If your world looks like this:

• OKRs live in Tool X (other goals platform, spreadsheets, whatever)
• Delivery lives in Jira
• Leadership keeps asking: "Can we show how Jira work ladders up to OKRs?"

…you're not alone.

The instinct for a lot of people is to over-engineer an integration or build some elaborate custom-field scheme to track OKR IDs on every story in Jira. Both paths tend to create more overhead than insight.

Accept that OKRs don't have to move right away

You don't need to migrate OKRs into Jira for this to work. Let the system of record for OKRs stay where it is for now. Your goal isn't to duplicate OKRs — it's to create clean linkages from Jira work items to those OKRs.

Resist the urge to recreate your entire OKR tree in Jira. That leads to two sources of truth, stale data, and a lot of "wait, which one is right?" conversations.

Use Atlassian Goals as the bridge

This is where Atlassian Goals (formerly Atlas) earns its keep. With the recent rollout of Goal Types (December 2025), you can now define types that match your framework — Objectives, Key Results, Big Rocks, "Other Tool" Tracking, whatever your org calls them — and even attach Success Measures for outcome tracking. That makes Goals a natural bridge layer between your external OKR tool and Jira execution.

Here's how to set it up practically:

• Create Goals that mirror your OKRs at a sensible level of granularity. Not every Key Result needs its own Goal. Think "what would I want to filter Jira work by?" A good rule of thumb: if you'd want to pull up all related epics in a review, it deserves a Goal.
• Name them so they're recognizable from both worlds — e.g. same exact name on both sides or FY26 Q2 – Increase Activation – KR1. People jumping between your OKR tool and Jira should immediately know what maps to what.

Now you have a stable object in the Atlassian ecosystem to attach work to, without having to move where OKRs are authored and managed.

Attach work at the highest reasonable level

This is where teams most often go wrong. The temptation is to link every story or task directly to a Goal. Don't do this — it gets noisy fast and nobody maintains it.

Instead:

• Link Epics (or top-level parent work items in Jira) to the Goal. Let stories and tasks inherit meaning from their parent.
• Skip the custom fields. I've seen teams create "OKR ID" or "Strategic Objective" custom fields on every work item type. It sounds clean in theory, but in practice it becomes a data entry tax that developers ignore within three sprints.

In practice, a clean structure looks like:

Goal = "Increase activation by 10%" → Epic = "Improve onboarding checklist experience" → → Stories = design, build, experiment — all under that Epic

Your reporting becomes: "Show me all epics linked to Goal X, and their delivery status." That's a question Jira can answer natively. And Jira Plans can also show the work items grouped by the Goals (or stack ranked in a different way with the Goal as a column value).

Make review cadence part of the design

The magic isn't the link itself — it's the review rhythm. Links without reviews are just metadata. Links with reviews are alignment.

Before or after your OKR check‑ins, pull:

• "Issues linked to Goal X — what's in progress, what's done?"
• Are we working on the right epics?
• Are we actually finishing anything meaningful?
• Do we need to re‑scope, add, or remove epics?

This keeps OKR reviews grounded in real delivery, not just slideware. And it gives leadership what they're actually asking for: not a perfect OKR-to-task mapping, but confidence that the work happening in Jira is connected to the outcomes the business cares about.

The Overall OKR -> Goals -> Execution Framework Could Look Something Like This

And the "Project" could be within the Atlassian Goals layer with that lightweight function of people owning weekly status updates there. You could also think about storing an ID on just the Atlassian Goal level too (then it opens the door for advanced automation until you decide to do everything directly in the Atlassian ecosystem or if you need to remain with the two-platform setup).

Over to you: How are you tying Jira work to OKRs that live in another tool today?

• Pure links/URLs?
• Atlassian Goals?
• Custom fields?
• Something else entirely?

Drop your pattern (or your horror story) below 👇

[Cornelia Jeppsson]

We do almost exactly this - Use Atlassian Goals to track OKRs, and then we have a level above Epic in Jira that we call Initiatives - some initiatives are contributing towards an OKR and in that case it's linked using the Goal field, and some Initiatives, such as compliance or other must-do big stuff that doesn't really go towards an OKR but would still require lots of epics in different jira spaces, is not linked to any OKR. We have found that to be a good balance for us. Previously we only had Epics and OKRs but found that people tended to push things into "OKRs" that wasn't really OKRs at all but it was the only way to get the visibility. Initiatives solved that problem for us!

[Greg D]

@Cornelia Jeppsson thanks for sharing your setup and it is great to hear what other people have up and running!

We also have an Initiative level above Epic, but scaling it on the Jira side is more rigid (some teams want a level in between that and Epic, some above Initiative and below Theme, etc.)... the nice thing about the Atlassian Goals is they have flexibility to build as many levels of hierarchy in different ways as they want there. And now with more Goal Types you can segment which are tied to OKRs in the other tool, which are actually OKRs if you are shifting them into Atlassian, and which ones are completely separate from OKRs with a different structure.

But we are trying to think through if we should have an Initiative level in the OKR tool to not tie directly to OKRs in some partially related things too.

That makes sense to have some Initiatives that are not tied to OKRs at all and I think we have the same setup on our Jira side!