Seeking ideas & feedback: Goals & Projects APIs

[#1]

Hi everyone,

My name is Kimmiko and I’m a product manager here on the Atlassian Home team. We’re currently exploring how we can improve the Goals API, as well as how we should build out the Projects API so that they can better serve your specific use case needs.

I have seen consistent feedback and ideas regarding how the APIs can fit into your automated processes and data usage, and we want to learn more about how we can make this a great experience for customers before an official launch.

If you have some time next week, please let me know!

Noting that there will still be availability after the Christmas and New Years holidays.

I’ve set up a booking link so you can pick a time that’s best for us to chat.

We really appreciate it, can’t wait to hear your thoughts!

https://calendly.com/kjames2-atlassian/product-research

[Karine VANEL]

Hi @Kimmiko James ,
I'm really happy that you are working on the API part of the project. We would need it to synchronize our project plan tool and Atlas. (For initialization: bulk creation) and for unit updates

[Patrik Mazanek]

For us, probably as for almost all users, we need API to synchronize goals and projects with some of our internal tools - initially basic REST API with ability to get all projects/goals with basic properties such as status, etc. would be suitable.

[Ted Henry]

I am interested in creating a custom top-level dashboard based on Atlas goals, projects, and teams.  I don't see a way to do this currently.  Is Atlas data available within Atlassian Analytics?  An API could make it possible to create custom views that could help connect goals/teams/projects.

[Christian Voigt]

We currently use the oboard plugin to plan and track our OKRs and use the oboard API to give other tools the possibility to read those OKRs (their title, description, responsilble team and progress).

Therefore an API is a mandatory feature for us to switch from the oboard Plugin to Atlassian Goals.

See my comment in the new feature request regarding this topic: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ATLAS-140

[Florian Royer]

Hi @Kimmiko James 

We also would like to have the possibility to create projects and goals from Automation.

We would like to flag some of our Epics to automatically create Projects. The automation should have a couple of fields dynamically filled like the Owner, Description and others.

 Thanks

[erik_honn]

You need to first of all improve how goals and projects work in general. The experience is just not good enough to be worth using at the moment.

Some immediate thoughts:

• Projects shouldn't be a 1 to 1 mapping to Jira epics. I already have the epic, I don't need a mirror of it elsewhere. Most large projects include multiple epics from multiple teams so multiple epics per project is needed for projects to serve a real purpose. In fact, I am very unsure what the current version of projects is even meant to do.
• Easier navigation from the goals page to the projects page.
• We still can't remove updates, even in the UI, or do a lot of other basic CRUD operations.
• I don't want to have to link a goal to an epic in Jira to see it in that team. I should be able to link the team to the Jira project and get it that way. We might have long term goals that we haven't yet started working on but that we still want to see, and making placeholder epics is just annoying.
• Metrics need a major overhaul.
  • Better automated reporting capabilities.
  • More than one metric per goal. Yes, ideally each goal has a single clear metric, but in reality a lot of goals have to be measured by indirect indicators, and then more than one is usually needed. Splitting into sub-goals for this is possible but becomes redundant, because your sub-goal IS your metric and just adds an extra step that is annoying to deal with.
  • Being able to view a page of your metrics without having to go through goals. Would also make it easier to remove old metrics.
• Having a representation of KPIs would be very nice. Time-unbound metrics that projects and goals can contribute to, and the change of which could be a progress alternative for goals and projects.

In general, goals and projects shows some promise in fulfilling a need that the other tools currently don't. The larger scale management of the organisation. What do we focus on? What KPIs do we have? What are our big bets? What outcomes do we expect? How do all of these things cascade through the organisation? But right now it's just a couple of wonky entities that don't fit together into a cohesive whole, so we can't us it for this (and we have tried).