Objectives can be nested into their own hierarchy, enhancing transparency, alignment, and accountability by helping you model and track company goals within a more realistic structure.
In this article:
- What is an objective hierarchy?
- Building an objective hierarchy board
- Adding new objectives to the hierarchy
- Editing objective hierarchy structure
- Editing objective details
- Including key results in your hierarchy
- Converting objectives into other entities
- Assigning objectives to initiatives and features
- See also
What is an objective hierarchy?
Nesting objectives within a structured hierarchy allows product teams to connect company strategic objectives to each individual product team's objectives, ensuring their efforts directly align with the company's strategic goals.
Product and company leaders also gain valuable insights. They can easily see how the combined efforts of individual teams contribute to achieving the broader business goals. This fosters transparency and accountability and keeps everyone working toward the same vision.
The objective hierarchy unlocks this opportunity for product teams, enabling them to:
- Structure objectives in a hierarchy.
- Use nested objectives for more complex portfolio management.
- Flexibly create objectives at the company, department, and team levels (or whichever you choose).
- Plan objectives, initiatives and features together.
Building an objective hierarchy board
An objective hierarchy board helps you visualize your objectives and their relationships to each other. You can also use it to create and edit new objectives. Here's how to build one:
- Create a new Grid.
- In the Board controls sidebar, under Items, set Objectives as your main item. Make sure it's formatted as hierarchy.
- Click Apply.
- (Optional) You'll see any pre-existing objectives appear on the grid. If you wish to hide any of them from view, consider adding a filter. For instance, you might filter out any objectives with the Completed status.
Adding new objectives to the hierarchy
Once your hierarchy board is ready, you can start building out the objective hierarchy itself by creating new objectives. There are two ways to do this.
Note: You’ll be notified if you create an objective that doesn’t match your board's filters.
New top-level objective
Top-level objectives are best for company-wide, strategic goals that your business works toward over several quarters.
To add objectives to the top of your hierarchy:
- Click Create objective at the bottom of the item list.
- Type in the name of your new objective and press Enter/Return.
New child objective
Child objectives are best for department or team-wide goals that act like stepping stones toward achieving their parent objectives.
To create a nested child objective:
- Click the Add child objective button to the right of any existing objective.
- Type in the name of your new objective and press Enter/Return.
Editing objective hierarchy structure
You can easily rearrange the relationships between your objectives by clicking and dragging them around on the grid. Use the nest arrow to reveal or hide an objective's children, if any are displayed on the board.
Note: If all an objective's children are hidden by a filter, it will not have a nest arrow.
Editing objective details
Once you’ve got some objectives on your grid, you can start editing their details. You can do this from an objective’s details sidebar or by adding grid columns.
By sidebar
Click on an objective to open its details sidebar. From here you may edit its relationships and add new items as children.
By columns
Add columns to your grid to view and edit key information for your objectives without having to open each one individually.
Including key results in your hierarchy
You may wish to include key results in your objective hierarchy visualization. This can be useful for creating and inspecting the metrics by which you measure your success.
See Building and tracking key results for more details about key results themselves.
To visualize key results on your objective hierarchy grid:
- Open Board controls.
- Under Items, click Add items > Key results.
- Click Apply.
Converting objectives into other entities
If you realize that an objective would be better represented as an initiative or feature, you can convert it into that item type without having to recreate it.
- Click on the objective to open its sidebar.
- In the top right corner of the objective's Detail tab, click the ••• More actions button.
- Select Convert to initiative or Convert to feature from the dropdown menu.
- Follow any on-screen prompts to complete the conversion.
You can't convert an objective directly into a feature, but you can convert an objective into an initiative, which can then be converted into a feature. See Initiative management in Productboard for details.
Assigning objectives to initiatives and features
Once your objective hierarchy is built, you can start connecting it to the rest of your work. Objectives are primarily meant to connect to initiatives, but you can also assign objectives directly to features if you like.
There are two main ways to create a relationship between objectives and other item types.
1: From the objective sidebar
To assign items to an objective:
- Click an objective to open its details sidebar.
- Scroll down to the Initiatives or Features section.
- Click the plus buttons beside the section name.
- Select an item from the list that appears.
You can remove item assignments from here by clicking the Remove button that appears when you hover over an item.
2: From a column on a grid
You can assign items to objectives by putting those objectives up on a grid board as a column. See Grid boards: Planning and prioritization management for details about adding columns.