Profit.co + Jira: A Powerful Combination for Streamlined Business Success

Today’s businesses need a GPS for success, one that bridges the gap between high-level vision and daily execution. That GPS is your OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), the gold standard for goal setting. They offer a clear path to measure progress and align teams. But the real challenge lies in execution—crafting aspirational yet achievable objectives and ensuring everyone rows in the same direction.

Many organizations struggle to unlock the full potential of OKRs. Profit.co’s OKR solution integrates seamlessly with Jira, allowing you to track both product management (Initiatives, Themes, Features) and product execution (tasks, stories, bugs) against business goals set in OKRs. This powerful synergy unlocks end-to-end visibility, aligning business and product strategies.

Imagine setting smarter objectives backed by data-driven insights. Picture real-time progress tracking and the ability to adapt strategies on the fly. Profit.co equips teams to transform strategic visions into tangible results.

So, what are OKRs?

In simple terms, the acrReady to Explore More?onym stands for “Objectives and Key Results.” In more detail, an OKR can be defined as a rigorous goal-setting and tracking method invented by Andrew Grove and used in Intel from its early years and later adopted by Google. Andrew Grove derived the concept of OKR from the teachings of Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives. People also know him as the father of the OKR methodology.

OKR is a goal management system used by teams, large and small, to collaborate and achieve stretch goals through a framework that requires regular check-ins, feedback, continuous learning, collaboration and problem-solving.

OKRs are simple yet powerful, as they are useful for startups and large corporations to execute their strategy with focus and alignment.

Objectives (the O in OKR) are qualitative, inspirational, time-bound (typically in a quarter) goals to be executed by a team (say, Engineering) or an individual.

Key Results (KR), on the other hand, quantify the OKR’s objective and break it down to specific metrics that can be used to measure the achievement of the Objectives.

Why do Companies Adopt OKRs?

The popularity of OKRs among Silicon Valley-type companies has created a desire for other organizations to adopt the same methodology. This stems from the success rates that these companies have achieved by setting stretch goals and fostering an agile culture. Google started using OKRs when they were 40 people, and even now, after becoming 150,000+ employees, they credit using OKRs as the top reason for their success. The ability to adapt quickly and efficiently to changing market conditions is a crucial factor in the success of these companies, and OKRs have proven to be an effective tool in achieving this agility.

The desire to achieve stretch goals and execute like a Silicon Valley company has led to a broader trend of organizations embracing a more agile culture. This culture emphasizes collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement, allowing teams to respond quickly to changing business needs. By embracing this culture, companies can become more nimble and better equipped to change faster, giving them a competitive edge in the marketplace.

However, it’s important to note that adopting an agile culture and implementing OKRs is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Each organization has unique goals and challenges, and it’s essential to tailor the approach to fit the specific needs of their business strategy. Additionally, it’s crucial to establish clear communication and transparency throughout the organization to ensure everyone is aligned and working towards shared objectives.

Grasping the Concept of OKRs

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) revolve around setting clear, impactful goals paired with specific, measurable outcomes. This begins by defining clear, concise, and inspiring objectives that describe the organization’s goals. These objectives are then linked with key results—specific, quantifiable milestones indicating progress. This linkage ensures that every effort is aligned with the overall strategic mission.

From Vision to Action

Breaking down strategic goals into actionable parts ensures alignment across the organization. The process follows a hierarchical structure:

Organizational Objectives: These high-level goals reflect the organization’s strategic mission, outlining broad aims that align with the long-term vision.

Key Results: For each objective, specific key results are identified. These are measurable indicators of progress that signify the successful achievement of the objective.

Department and Team OKRs: The organization’s objectives and key results are cascaded down to departmental and team levels. This translates broad goals into more specific objectives and key results relevant to each unit, ensuring collective contribution towards common goals.

Specific Initiatives: These are projects or actions undertaken to achieve the key results. Initiatives represent the tactical execution plan for turning OKRs into reality.

Individual Epics/Stories/Tasks: At the most granular level, initiatives are broken down into epics, stories, and tasks that individuals or small teams can execute. This ensures that everyone understands their role in achieving the OKRs.

The OKR Advantage

1. Balancing Ambition and Realism

Set goals that are ambitious yet achievable, ensuring alignment and strategic coherence across all departments and teams.

2. Real-time Monitoring

Track progress towards goals in real-time, offering flexibility to adjust strategies based on new insights or changing circumstances.

3. Adapting Strategies

Quickly adapt strategies in response to new information or shifting priorities, maintaining agility and aligning strategic goals with daily operations.

JIRA

Plan, track, and release world-class software with this project management tool for agile teams. It is the single source of truth for your entire product development lifecycle, empowering autonomous teams with the context to move quickly while staying connected to the greater business goal.

Jira uses epics to track product issues and client requests. Epics as a larger story help break user stories with a distinct beginning and the end, into smaller user stories or tasks based on the demands and needs of the end-users or the customers. Also, these user stories or tasks can be added or removed from the epic as per the product demand and customer’s requirements.

All the epics and the objects within an epic not only contain stories and tasks but also manage issues and bugs and all of these get managed within Jira. So the main objective of Jira is to help users organize and prioritize their work in order to create a structural hierarchy. This is because epic has the agility to organize more complex tasks into simple, smaller tasks.

Need for Integrating Jira with OKRs

Traditionally, aligning business strategy with product development has been a siloed process. Business goals often remain disconnected from the day-to-day realities of product teams. By integrating OKRs with Jira, businesses can create a seamless workflow between product organization and business organization. This powerful integration bridges the gap between business strategy and product management, ensuring product teams are working on features that directly support achieving overall business goals. This integrated approach empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, improve resource allocation, save time, and ensure that product development efforts directly translate into achieving business objectives.

How an OKR Tool Like Profit.co Can Make All The Difference

• Seamless Integration: Integrates effortlessly with various third-party apps, providing a comprehensive source of truth.
• Real-time Monitoring: Offers real-time monitoring, planning, and reporting across all organizational levels.
• Strategic Alignment: Ensures alignment between enterprise strategy and day-to-day activities.
• Executive Empowerment: Equips executives with up-to-date business data for faster decision-making and team unblocking.
• Effective OKR Structuring: Helps structure OKRs, understand their connection to KPIs, and assess their real-world impact.
• Advanced Planning and Delivery: Features sophisticated portfolio-level planning and delivery capabilities.

For your business to succeed, you need to use several different platforms. Companies might need platforms for collaboration, productivity, task tracking, and more. In conclusion, integrating Profit.co with Jira is not just about enhancing your current tools—it’s about transforming how your organization aligns strategy with execution. While Jira uses epics to track product issues and client requests, Profit.co is OKR-focused management software that helps to achieve strategic goals. The process and technical changes involved in this integration enable a seamless flow of information, ensuring that strategic goals are directly connected to day-to-day activities. By embedding OKRs within Jira, Profit.co provides a unified platform where teams can track both their tasks and their alignment with larger organizational objectives. This powerful combination drives efficiency, enhances visibility, and empowers your business to achieve more, ultimately making a significant difference in your overall success.

Ways of Working – Jira Integration With OKRs

The below flow chart clearly shows the collaborative process of product management using OKRs with the Jira and Profit.co integration, thereby bridging the gap between business strategy and product strategy.

The process starts with the leadership team outlining the business strategy and defining corporate OKRs in Profit.co. Department heads then translate these into departmental OKRs and cascade them to their teams. This collaborative effort informs the product strategy, with the Head of Product considering both departmental OKRs and overall business goals.

They then establish roadmaps in Jira, identify initiatives and features, and prioritize epics through collaborative planning. These epics are associated with both the product strategy and departmental OKRs within Profit.co.

Finally, product and engineering teams create detailed tasks within Jira that are assigned to sprints. Progress on these tasks automatically feeds back into Profit.co, providing real-time visibility into achieving key results and ensuring tight alignment between business strategy and product development.

Here are the key highlights

Hierarchical Objectives

• Profit.co mirrors the product strategy directly into the key results hierarchy, making it easy to see how each issue in Jira contributes to broader business goals.
• Teams can work within their familiar Jira structure while ensuring strategic alignment with company-wide objectives.
• Profit.co supports the custom hierarchy you’ve established in Jira, allowing you to seamlessly align objectives at any level within Profit.co as OKRs. Whether your Jira hierarchy
• includes multiple levels of objectives or specific task categorizations, Profit.co can integrate with these structures, ensuring that all levels of your organization are aligned with your strategic goals.
• Creating objectives in Profit.co involves selecting the appropriate level (team, program, solution, or portfolio), filling out relevant details, classifying objectives, and linking them to key results and subkey results.

Strategic Planning

• Objectives can be set during quarterly sprint planning meetings and are refined to align with the organization’s strategic goals.
• Profit.co provides seamless alignment between business strategy and product strategy by automating key results and progress tracking directly from Jira’s custom issue hierarchy.
• This integration ensures comprehensive visibility, from high-level strategic objectives to detailed progress within each Epic, Task, Story, and Bug, and also any custom hierarchy at top levels including Features, Themes, Initiatives, etc.
• It ensures that every team and department is working towards the same overarching objectives.

Key Results Management

• Profit.co allows the creation of key results, linking them to initiatives and breaking them down further into subkey results like features and epics. This approach enables tracking the expected benefits described in epics as measurable outcomes using key results, ensuring that strategic goals are effectively translated into tangible achievements.
• It automates tracking Key Results, Subkey Results, and their progress using Jira KPIs, making reporting effortless and accurate.

Real-time Progress Tracking

• The existing progress updates in Jira issues automatically update your OKR progress in Profit.co, spotlighting the outcomes for long-term corporate goals. This seamless integration allows users to update the progress of their key results in real-time through Jira, ensuring continuous alignment with strategic objectives.
• This real-time monitoring ensures that organizations can track their progress towards strategic goals and make necessary adjustments.
• Managers and teams can visualize progress at every level, ensuring everyone is aligned and moving towards common goals.

Integration and Visibility

• When an “Initiative” is linked to Profit.co, the process begins by creating the Initiative as a key result. Themes are created to organize and group related features, with each theme encompassing multiple features. For example, Theme 1 would include Feature 1, and Theme 2 would include Feature 2, each of which is created as a subkey result under the Initiative key result. Within each feature, Epics are established—Epic 1 within Feature 1 and Epic 2 within Feature 2—also as subkey results. The progress of these The progress of these epics can be tracked either by the Task % KPI or by other percentage-based tracking methods.
• This integration provides end-to-end visibility of business and product strategies in a single platform, ensuring that both are aligned and transparent across the organization.
• Managers can monitor progress in real-time, enabling quick adjustments to strategies and resource allocation as needed.

This integration is designed to be hassle-free, requiring only a one-time setup. Once integrated, Jira and Profit.co work seamlessly together, eliminating the need for any additional manual effort from your Product and Engineering teams. The integration supports the agile manifesto’s principle of “more work, less documentation.” Teams can focus more on actual development work and less on maintaining records, thus enhancing productivity and efficiency.

Why Choose Profit.co?

Customizable Magic: No one-size-fits-all here. Tailor the integration to your unique Jira setup and KPIs.

Product Strategy Made Visible: See exactly how every Jira issue contributes to your broader business goals.

Strategic Alignment: Teams stay in their Jira comfort zone while staying laser-focused on company-wide objectives.

Effortless Tracking: Our seamless integration automates key result tracking and progress updates directly from your custom Jira setup. Reporting just got easy.

Real-Time Visibility: Monitor progress all the way from product strategy level down to the individual task level and make adjustments on the fly.

By integrating Profit.co with Jira, you get the best of both worlds: the powerful OKR engine of Profit.co and the familiar interface of Jira. Achieve strategic alignment, enhance transparency, and drive operational excellence with ease.

Conclusion

The integration of Profit.co and Jira represents a powerful combination for businesses seeking streamlined success. By leveraging Profit.co’s robust OKR management capabilities and Jira’s comprehensive project tracking features, organizations can bridge the gap between high-level strategic objectives and daily operational tasks including the sprint execution. This synergy fosters alignment, transparency, and real-time progress tracking, enabling teams to adapt quickly to changing conditions and focus on overarching business goals.

Profit.co’s ability to customize OKR hierarchies to fit specific organizational needs ensures that every department and team can work towards its unique objectives while contributing to its broader mission. The seamless integration with Jira allows for effortless tracking and reporting, reducing the administrative burden and enhancing decision-making processes.

Ultimately, the combination of Profit.co and Jira empowers businesses to set ambitious yet achievable goals, monitor real-time progress, and make data-driven adjustments as needed. This dynamic approach to goal management and project execution provides a clear path to success, driving operational excellence and strategic alignment across the organization. By adopting this integrated solution, companies can unlock their full potential and navigate the complexities of today’s business landscape with confidence and agility.