Connect OKRs to roadmaps in workflows with the Objectives app in airfocus

Watch: Objectives app

Benefits of using airfocus objectives

Your OKRs now connect with your product work. Say “goodbye” to spreadsheets and disconnected goals. Manage your OKRs in airfocus and connect them to your roadmaps and workflows. Get all your product artifacts in one place to understand your teams' progress across all levels – from a single user story all the way up to your long-term company objectives.

Link your airfocus items such as initiatives, epics, or tasks, to key results to ensure the day-to-day product work contributes to the overall strategy.

Submit regular check-ins to get real-time context of your progress, helping you spot at-risk objectives and make timely adjustments.

Build organizational transparency and increase trust among teams. Help individual team members understand how their work contributes to the company's overall success by making OKRs widely accessible.

Flexible configuration: Track your goals regardless of what process or framework you use. Benefit from airfocus' flexibility by customizing objective hierarchies, time periods, views, and fields to reflect how you plan and work.

Initial setup

Members can begin the initial installation of the Objectives app from the dedicated “Objectives workspaces” section in the left navigation side bar or from the extensions dropdown on any of their regular workspaces. During the installation, the Objectives app automatically creates the team’s first objective workspace.

Time periods

Administrators can setup custom time periods during the initial setup and manage them via the Objectives app settings at any time. Time periods define the date ranges your objectives and key results are tracked in. Each time period consists of a label (name of the period), a start date as well as an end date which can all be customized.

Confidence

Confidence levels give progress graphs and check-ins their color and help teams understand how confident they are on achieving a certain objective or key result. It reflects how much the actual progress of the objective or key result differs from the expected level at a given date of the time period. Members can modify the confidence level by creating / updating the latest check-in on a given objective or key result.

Example above: If your actual progress is 20% below the expected value for the selected date on your time period, then it will by default get a confidence level of “At risk” and turn your progress icon and graph yellow.

Objective workspaces

Objective workspaces can only be created when the Objectives app is installed. Objective workspaces are displayed in a dedicated section in the navigation side bar and can be structured in an objective hierarchy.

Objective workspaces have a couple of restrictions / differences compared to normal workspaces:

• They do not allow for the installation of any apps or integrations other than the Objectives app.
• The time period and confidence field settings are not managed on the objective workspaces settings but on the Objectives app level.
• Hierarchy can only be set to other objective workspaces.
• Normal basic hierarchy progress tracking is hidden in objective workspaces.
• For objective workspaces the hierarchy can only be managed by adding or deleting parent/child objective workspaces via the side bar.

Objective workspace settings

The objective workspace settings lets members manage all settings of the objective workspace:

• General
  • Objective workspace name
  • Objective color (Default)
  • Linked workspaces - Here members can choose those workspaces that contain items that should be linked with key results of the objective workspace.
• Fields
  • Like in the regular workspace settings members can configure all fields that should be present in the objective workspace here.
• Permissions
  • Like in the regular workspace settings members can configure who should have which level of access to the objective workspace on a team wide and individual member basis.
  • Objective workspaces have the option to cascade permissions for a parent workspace to any child workspaces. Learn more in our Manage members, roles, and permissions in airfocus article.

Objective hierarchy

Objective workspaces can be configured in hierarchy, meaning that you can create parent and child objective workspaces to your existing objective workspaces. This enables you to create parent and child objective structures to better reflect your more complex OKR workflows.

In order to create a parent or child workspace, administrators need to hover over an existing objectives workspace in the navigation side bar, click on the plus icon and choose the corresponding option.

Objectives

Objectives are a special type of item that can only be managed inside of objectives workspaces, which can only be created with the Objectives app installed. Like any other item type they can can be configured with custom fields and managed in all view types other than the Chart view (because the Priority Ratings app can not be installed for them).

Members can add key results to objectives which track progress towards measurable goals and can in turn be linked to operational product items.

After configuring a child objective workspace, members can also create parent / child objectives to other objectives.

Every objective has an app card of the Objectives app that shows:

• The progress of the objective based on the calculation method chosen in actual and normalised values.
• The confidence level of achieving the target goal.
• A graph depicting the progress of the objective over the time period.
• The dots on the graph mark the check-ins that members have added, on click they’ll reveal the check-in details.
• The history of all check-ins on click on the app card itself.

Fields on objectives

As objectives are items (with some special rules) they do also have all system and custom fields available for all other item types. Additionally, they have the following fields which are added by the Objectives app:

• Time period - Managed via the Objective app settings and available on all objective workspaces. This field allows members to define in which time period an objective is meant to be worked on. Time periods consist of:
  • Time period name (e.g. “Q3 2023”)
  • Start + end date (date range)
• Progress - Is shown in multiple different places and formats:
  • As a setting in the item details field section: Members can change the calculation method that the progress is based on here.
  • As a widget (progress circle with normalized progress percentage in the center) on item cards and the app card on objectives.
  • As an actual value fraction of the progress on the app card on objectives next to the progress widget.
  • As a graph on the app card showing the progress in actual values over the time period.

Progress calculation modes for objectives

• “Aggregation” (default), which takes the average normalized progress of all linked key results and sub-objectives in percent and adds a lightning icon next to all progress indicators.
• “Manual”, which allows members to set a custom start and target value and choose between different units:
  • Percent
  • Numeric
  • Money (Currency)
  • → In this calculation mode the progress is solely based on the members manual inputs made with "check-ins".
• “None”, which allows members to have objectives without tracking specific progress on them.

Key results

Key results allow members to set measurable targets that they can connect to their operational product work to track their progress. Key results can only exist in connection to a single objective and can optionally link to multiple items of different workspaces.

Fields on key results

Progress calculation modes for key results

• “Aggregation”, which divides the number of linked items with a status in the closed category by the total number of linked items.

• “Manual", method which allows members to set a custom start and target value and choose between different units:

  • Percent
  • Numeric
  • Money (Currency)

  In this calculation mode the progress is solely based on the members manual inputs made with so called check-ins.

Check-ins

Check-ins can be made to add updates to the progress graph of objectives and key results. Check-ins are displayed as dot entries on the progress graph on objectives and key results and in the check-in history, which is shown in the app details on objectives and at the bottom of any key result.

Fields on check-ins

• A check-in date
  • By default the check-in date is set to the members current time and date. The member can optionally change the date to something in the past but within the defined time period.
• Progress (editable in "Manual" mode only)
  • Members can enter the current progress towards the target.
• Confidence
  • By default, the confidence is chosen based on the confidence levels configured in the Objectives app and the current progress set for the check-in. Members can adjust this value manually to more accurately reflect their confidence level towards reaching the target set.
• Comment (optional)
  • Members can add a comment in plain text to add additional context or other information to the check-in.

Auto check-ins

The Objectives app makes auto check-ins when:

• The status of one of the linked items of a key result is changed to one of the closed categories if the progress calculation method of the key result is set to “Aggregation”.
• The progress of a linked sub-objective or key result changes and in turn updates the progress of an objective if it has its progress calculation method set to “Aggregation”.

Member check-ins

Members can make check-ins to:

• Make a manual adjustment to an otherwise automatically tracked objective or key result:
  • Whenever the aggregation mode makes an automatic update to the progress of the objective or key result, it calculates the total progress based on the value changes of the connected sub-entities and the confidence level based on the confidence levels configured in the Objectives app. Should the member wish to make a correction or add some context, they can add a manual check-in which will override the automatic one until the next automatic check-in takes the lead again.
• Make a check-in to advance progress and express confidence:
  • When the progress is based on manual updates in a start and target value range, check-ins are the way to make an update to the progress. The latest check-in defines the overall progress.

Notifications

As objectives behave like regular items they also trigger the same general notifications for members that are watching them. In addition, there are a couple of notifications that are triggered through the Objectives app.

• Objectives only trigger notifications for the members that are assigned to, or are watching the objectives, when a member manually or the app automatically adds a check-in to the objective.
• Key results only trigger notifications for the members that are assigned to the key result when another member manually or the objective app automatically adds a check-in to the key result.

Filters

The Objectives app adds a couple of filters to the objective workspaces and regular workspaces.

On objective workspaces

On regular workspaces

Display options

The Objectives app adds a couple of new fields that you can hide/show on most views.

New fields added to objective workspaces

• Time period
• Progress
• Confidence
• Key results

Fields added to regular workspaces

• Key results

Groups

• On objective workspaces you can (sub-) group by:
  • Confidence
  • Time period (label)
• On regular workspaces you can (sub-) group by:
  • Objectives
  • Key results

Permissions

Permissions work relatively similar to how they do for normal workspaces, but here is a detailed list of permission requirements that you need in order to perform actions of the objectives use case:

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