Update on Jira Align Objectives

[#1]

Hi, Jira Align!

My name is Sam Ugulava and I am a Senior Product Manager working on Jira Align. I spent my first ~2 years at Atlassian working on Confluence Cloud, but recently made the move over to Enterprise Agility where I lead our Jira Align Planning & Execution group.

One of the first projects I’ve taken over is our work on Objectives, specifically OKRs. We know our customers deeply care about this area of the product, so I wanted to give you an update on our path forward.

We’re listening to you

Feedback comes to us through several channels: metrics, JAC tickets, TAMs, scheduled calls with the product team, and the comment box you see when switching between the new and old OKR experiences. As a user, I can imagine it sometimes feels like your feedback is being sucked into a blackhole, but I want to assure you that I have read every single piece of feedback you’ve shared since I transitioned on to the JA team a few weeks ago.

Here are 6 major themes I’ve noticed:

• The overall user experience is confusing, overly complicated, and frustrating

• The ability to edit and delete objectives is critical

• The experience is missing key fields / data

• Sharing the “why” and adding context to objective statuses is a must

• The new experience is missing SAFe and milestone objectives

This list does not represent all of the feedback you’ve shared and should not be interpreted as a prioritized list of our commitments. Having said that, my team will be prioritizing Objectives in this next quarter and hope to ship improvements to the experience.

Next steps

Our team completed a design audit of the Objectives experience. We’re taking the results of that audit and mapping it to the feedback you’ve shared with us. In early January, our amazing Product Designer will create an updated clickable prototype that we hope to test with customers to get their feedback. Once we validate the improved UX, we’ll work with our engineering teams to start building and shipping those updates to you.

We want to make sure your voices are part of this process, so if you are interested in getting involved, please let me know!

After going through all of your Objective feedback, I just want to take a second to thank you for helping us make Jira Align better. I’m excited to partner with you.

[Tim Keyes]

Thank you Sam!

[Katherine Gray]

Thank you so much for posting this, Sam! We're so excited you're on the TEAM!

[Rebecca Hylek]

Hi Sam!  Very excited to hear about new things for Jira Align and assist in any way I can!

[Aislinn Singh]

So excited to see what's ahead and would love to test if needed from a customer perspective. My experience with Jira and Confluence has been pleasant but when I moved to JIRA Align, it was the first time I've used a new UI that wasn't intuitive at all. Our teams got lost a lot and I've used many different requirements gathering systems. 

I'd love to see the support articles updated as well. We've all had to do a lot of research on our own for Jira Align and the lack of screenshots or information can be a bit confusing.

Again thanks so much for this update and would love to collaborate! :)