Marketplace Partner Spotlight: Oboard

For this month's partner spotlight, we're featuring Oboard, a Gold Marketplace Partner! We caught up with Viktor Grekov, Oboard's CEO and co-founder, about how his team comes up with new ideas for apps, what's next for them, and more.

 

Oboard photo.jpeg

Viktor presenting Oboard at Websummit in Lisbon in November 2022

Atlassian: What's your role at Oboard?

Viktor: I'm the CEO and co-founder. I'm also a product manager on our main products, OKR Board for Jira and OKR Board for Confluence. My team creates powerful OKR and goal-setting software that expands and improves the Atlassian ecosystem.

 

Atlassian: How does your team come up with ideas for new apps?

We're constantly gathering feedback through many channels. For example, we interview our customers on their issues, discuss feature requests with potential clients reviewing our app, and talk to people in the Atlassian community who share their problems. 

Viktor: Sometimes these suggestions grow into unique features — one of our enterprise customers with hundreds of teams worldwide requested an option to see their progress on a single timeline, and that's how our groundbreaking OKR Roadmap was born. Other times they help us improve existing tools — recently, we got feedback from a Brazilian start-up that gave us ideas on how to streamline Jira OKR check-ins.

We also monitor the official Atlassian initiatives and releases, and after each one we gather the team and brainstorm new ideas. For example, the recent Team '23 event gave us many exciting thoughts regarding team management in our apps, and you will see some of them come to life this year. We aim to synergize with Atlassian software, creating new opportunities for customers and improving their experience.

 

Atlassian: What do you think has been the secret to your success so far? 

Viktor: I'd say there are quite a few ;) 

The biggest one is understanding how our customers are growing and what tools they need to keep growing. We want to help them every step of the way while improving our products further.

Another secret is my team — they understand the OKR framework exceptionally well and can consistently deliver features and tools that improve our customers' workflow.

Finally, I want to mention our partners. The OKR framework is popular and relatively well-known but can also be challenging to implement. That is why we started offering OKR consulting services and partnered with several prominent OKR coaches. The results are excellent, and we will post our first case study with them on our website soon.

 

Atlassian: Tell us about your most popular app. What problem were you trying to solve for customers when you created it?  

Viktor: Our most popular app is OKR Board for Jira. It is a powerful OKR management platform that lets you set, track, and manage OKRs inside Jira, linking issues in Jira with objectives and key results. The app has been featured as an Atlassian Staff Pick this quarter. Right now, we have more than 150,000 users and over 2,500 installs with a significant number being Fortune 500 enterprise customers.

When we created this app, we wanted to make a tool that makes OKR adoption easier; so we heavily focused on user experience, ensuring that our UI was simple and intuitive while adding features that simplified routine OKR management. For example, a customizable OKR dashboard that automatically pulls current progress data from Jira. It can be easily turned into an executive report, and you can share it with others in your company in a single click.

Customizable OKR dashboards in OKR Board for Jira.png

Customizable OKR dashboards in OKR Board for Jira

 

We also wanted to make a tool that could support rapid enterprise growth. So from the initial planning stage, we made sure that OKR Board for Jira could help hundreds of teams and thousands of users without losing focus. This is where the OKR Roadmaps I mentioned before came into play, which equips companies with a bird’s eye view of the entire team, while also letting managers zoom into group/team OKRs to see how well they align with strategic goals. And when you add our other killer features — custom OKR dashboards, automated OKR reporting, customizable OKR weights, OKR levels, and intervals, etc. — OKR Board for Jira makes management a breeze in both an emerging start-up and a global corporation.

2. OKR Roadmap in OKR Board for Jira (1).png

OKR Roadmap in OKR Board for Jira

 

Lastly, I’ve got to mention security. It was one of our concerns since OKR management platforms inherently carry sensitive business information. That's why we heavily invested in security and bug bounty programs, earning the Gold Partner status in the Atlassian Marketplace.

 

Atlassian: What’s next for Oboard?

Viktor: Speaking of OKR Board for Jira, we want to power up the OKR check-ins even further and add several new integrations. The check-in updates will dramatically improve the user experience and simplify sprint-to-sprint Jira OKR management. For example, we're introducing a digest with all the check-in activities that will be automatically sent out to the team members. In addition, we will be expanding Oboard Public API and adding more options to export data from OKR Board for Jira into other tools.

We're also expanding our consulting services, providing in-house consulting and OKR coaching, and partnering with more consulting companies. Their community loves OKR Board for Jira since it dramatically simplifies OKR training and lets trainees easily visualize every framework aspect.

We have also recently released OKR Board for Salesforce, which is already at feature parity with the Jira version of the app. And we have a big project in the works that is also related to OKRs but on a much broader scale. It will be a web application that will still be deeply integrated with Jira and let businesses align teams that work in other work management tools.

To learn more about Oboard, check out their Atlassian Marketplace apps – and don’t forget to comment below and let us know what your favorite app is of theirs!

3 comments

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Damian Sachenko May 19, 2023

I am obviously biased, being an Oboard employee and all, but the team here is indeed very knowledgeable about OKRs. I used to think that I knew this framework well enough, but it turned out that I had so much more to learn.

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Julia Holovko - Oboard - OKR Board for Jira _ Confluence
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
May 19, 2023

I am glad to be part of the team! First in my career a fully remote team from so many different locations - Ukraine, Germany, Israel, Romania! 

Thanks, @Kelsey Van Scoy and Viktor for an interesting read =)

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Andy Gladstone
Community Leader
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Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 23, 2023

@Kelsey Van Scoy great article, I love learning about the different Marketplace Partners.

Oboard Team great job putting together an app that is so highly rated in the Marketplace with thousands of installs. 

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