Focus + Talent + Align: Share real-world experience at scale?

Andrew Zimmerman_rvmutq

This is actually multiple questions in one. 

If you've successfully implemented Atlassian Focus and Atlassian Talent at enterprise scale alongside a mature Jira Align site, would you be willing to share your experience?

I’m trying to better understand:

• How you separate responsibilities between Focus vs Align, and the framework you've taught to your users to think about what info is in one vs the other.

• Key lessons learned during implementation.

• Experiences migrating from other ERP/EMP tools into Focus & Talent.

• Whether Focus/Talent feel enterprise-ready for your org today, or like they are still early in evolving and you're depending on future development/investment from Atlassian into those apps. 

I would really value any honest insights about any of the above: what’s working, what’s not, and what you’d do differently.

Thanks in advance!

Bevan Williams

Bumping this question as well.

We've been using JA for the past few years, with mixed but mostly positive adoption rates once we overcame the initial hurdle of complexity. Overall, the feedback led us to start using Focus and Goals early on to compare functionality. We kicked off our first live focus area just after Atlassian added OKRs to Goals at the end of 2025 and have been running both in parallel.

While Talent has been active on our site for a while, our small tooling team has purposefully put it on the backburner until we have clarity on the Focus vs/+ Jira Align decision. We're looking to start integrating Talent with Workday soon.

Here's my experience so far of the two biggest challenges - hoping to learn from others and share notes. 

Engagement

Naturally, people find the native look and feel of Focus and Goals simpler to get started. We were ambitious, getting hundreds of people into both Jira and Jira Align at the same time. New users found getting started with the Focus solution a lot simpler

Data Import

Importing work item data into both Jira and Jira Align is relatively straightforward depending on the data. If you need to migrate full work history and multiple attachments, complexity can increase exponentially. At the time of the last configuration, neither Jira Align nor Goals allowed importing Objectives and Goals, respectively. Focus Area cascade can be imported. Either way, we had to do a lot of manual (re)creation of outcomes data.

Data Output

Custom reporting is critical for the diverse interests of different businesses and their users, so being able to easily link and extract data meant assessing how easy it was to generate custom reports using the data (not an assessment of Analytics or Power BI, etc). Being relatively new, the Focus and Goals data in EI was pretty unstructured; i.e. accessing Objects required custom JSON extraction via SQL queries. Jira Align's data, on the other hand, while much simpler to use with valid elements and the visual query function, is a mess. It's an exceptionally complex schema, so ensuring the right joins with the right data means many a custom table will be built.

Overall Verdict

Users are definitely leaning towards Focus because of the following massive pros:

• Easier to onboard to encourage engagement
• Less additional cognitive load for people who engage with the data every few weeks as opposed to daily
• Easier license management (native Atlassian)
• More rapid release/innovation cycle with the addition of the funding work (this was a game-changer for us, as Jira Align adoption of this was very limited)

I'm sure I'm forgetting more, but I'm happy to answer any specific questions.