Can’t roll up progress from objectives (sub-goals) to strategic goals anymore – forced to use succes

[Judit Agràs Masdeu]

Our company has a very clear goal hierarchy, and we’ve been using Atlas/Goals to mirror it:

1. Strategic Objective (top level, multi‑year)

   • Progress should be calculated as the average of its Objectives (these are its sub‑goals in Atlas).

2. Objectives (annual)

   • Progress is calculated as the average of their Key Results (defined quarterly).

3. Key Results (quarterly)

   • These map naturally to success measures in Atlassian Goals, with associated metrics.

So in practice:

• Objectives → progress averaged from success measures / key results

• Strategic Objective → progress averaged from its Objectives (sub-goals)

This structure used to be possible for us to reflect in the product.

What changed / the problem

From what we can tell in the current version of Atlassian Goals:

• A goal’s overall progress bar is now always calculated as the average of its success measures’ progress.

• Sub-goals no longer contribute to the parent goal’s progress.

This is fine (and even desirable) for our annual Objectives, where:

• Each Objective has several success measures (Key Results).

• We fully agree that the Objective’s progress should be the average of its success measures.

However, it breaks completely at the Strategic Objective level:

• Our top-level Strategic Objective has multiple Objectives as sub-goals.

• We need the Strategic Objective’s progress to be calculated as the average of those sub-goals’ progress, not from its own success measures.

• With the current behavior, we cannot have the Strategic Objective progress roll up from its Objectives. We would have to:

  • Duplicate the logic manually into success measures, or

  • Maintain additional “dummy” success measures that mirror the objectives’ progress.

This means our Strategic Objectives can no longer accurately reflect how the underlying Objectives are performing without significant manual workarounds.

Why this is critical for us

• Our entire strategy and OKR reporting model relies on:

  • Key Results → roll up into Objectives (via averaging).

  • Objectives → roll up into Strategic Objective (via averaging).

• The current behavior forces everything to be driven by success measures only, which:

  • Works at the Objective level (Key Results).

  • Does not work at the Strategic Objective level, where the natural “unit” is the objective itself, not another success-measure layer.

• We lose:

  • A clean mapping between our real hierarchy and the tool.

  • A reliable, automated roll-up from objectives to strategic objectives.

  • Trust in the top-level progress bar, because it no longer directly reflects the performance of the underlying objectives.

Right now, our only workaround is to:

• Calculate averages of Objective progress outside the tool, and

• Manually set a single success measure on the Strategic Objective like “Overall progress (average of objectives)”.

This is error-prone and breaks the transparency we had before.

What we’re asking

We’d really appreciate clarification and options on:

1. Is it expected behavior that:

   • Goal progress can only be calculated from success measures,

   • and that sub-goals never contribute to the parent goal’s progress?

2. Is there any way to configure a goal (especially top-level strategic goals) so that:

   • Its progress is calculated from its sub-goals, while

   • Those sub-goals (objectives) themselves continue to calculate progress from their success measures?

3. If not currently possible:

   • Is there a planned enhancement to:

     • Allow choosing between “progress from success measures” vs. “progress from sub-goals”, or

     • Provide a built-in pattern for rolling up sub-goal progress into the parent goal’s progress without manual duplication?

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Hi @Judit Agràs Masdeu ,

This is a bit tangled topic and it requires some additional testing, but by default, a goal’s progress is calculated as the average of its success measures (key results/metrics).

I've played around with this a bit, but I could get what you're looking for.

For example, even if you have success measures on a parent goal, which reuse metrics from sub-goals (and in the right sidebar, you can see each sub-goal's progress), you will still have to add updates for each success measure on the parent goal; despite those values being updates on sub-goals. 🤔

As stated here (at the end of the page):

Note: The Progress bar will only track the milestones for the goal or objective, but not the sub-goals.

I've checked official suggestions/feature requests about this, but there isn't one explicitly related to what you're looking for. Best I could find was:

• ATLAS-104: As an Atlassian Home user, I want to update the progress of a Goal automatically based on progress of linked Jira Issues 
• AUTO-1683: Add support for Goals and Projects in Automation 

I can see how this could be beneficial, and you could reach out to Atlassian Support and discuss that with them. Their staff can then raise a new feature suggestion on which you can vote and leave comments 👈

Cheers,
Tobi