Categorize goals and projects with topics

Topics (curated by tagging objects), are a simple, powerful way to get more value from goals and projects, especially as you scale.

What you can do with topics

Get a tailored feed of updates based on a topic

Just like goals, projects, and teams, you can also follow topics. Search for any topic in the directory, or select any tag on the right sidebar of a goal or project to go to that topic’s home page.

When you follow a topic you will:

• Get a dedicated feed of updates from projects, goals, and questions tagged with that topic.

• See updates from projects and goals on that topic in your digest via email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams

Find and export all projects or goals tagged with topics

From both the projects and goals directories, you'll be able to filter results based on topics. Topics are a great way to aggregate goals or projects that may not be grouped by any existing filter. You can combine filters with AND/OR statements like, Tag is marketing or engineering. You can embed results in Jira or Confluence Cloud using smart links or export to CSV.

Create dynamic reports of projects from a topic

Great for program/initiative/team reporting, when you paste a link to a topic and select Display embed, you get a live view list of all current and upcoming projects tagged with that topic. Expanding a project will show its latest update.

Standardizing tags to better curate topics

Creating a standard system of tagging at your organization can help your teams align and communicate the status of work. This will help keep your projects and goals categorized and aid the creation of roll-up reports that can be embedded in Jira or Confluence Cloud, or exported to CSV.

Using tags to curate topics is incredibly flexible, so it's really up to you how you use them. Below are a few examples of how we use topics at Atlassian, which will hopefully inspire your own tagging system.

Use topics to reflect a department

Tag a project to reflect the department within which it is being run. Examples include:

• dept--product

• dept--marketing

• dept--partnerships

• dept--legal

• dept--finance

Use topics to reflect a sub-department

Similar to the department above, but one click down. For example:

• dept--product--mobile

• dept--marketing-pmm

• dept--partnerships--channel

Tag to reflect a phase or stage

Use this to indicate which phase or stage a unit of work is in based on whatever framework your company or teams use. For example:

• kickoff

• wonder

• explore

• make

• impact

Tag to reflect the size of work

Since projects can be used to communicate the context and progress against units of work of all shapes and sizes, tag work to reflect the size of a "project". For example:

• size-project

  • Length: 1 - 4 Months in duration. It needs to make sense as something to communicate about

  • Size: Across 1 - 3 Teams. An absolute minimum of 2 people

  • Should be a high enough order piece of work to benefit from consistent communication

• size-initiative

  • Length: 3 → 18 Months in duration

  • Size: Think Big Rock items on a roadmap. Generally across 2+ departments or MANY teams

  • Should consist of at least 3+ concurrent projects, usually more often 5-10 or more

• size-program

  • Length: Greater than 1 year in length

  • Size: Always cross-department and more often cross-org/company

  • Across 3+ concurrent initiatives and more often 5-10

  • Probably only a small number of these across the company