What is a metric?

Metrics allow you to track and evaluate goal progress in a more structured and digestible format. Atlassian goals link metrics to success measures (or key results) to track progress toward the goal’s completion. Metrics have a dedication section on the success measure page, adding a visualization for the metric’s progress over time. This helps you communicate progress to stakeholders more effectively and drive faster, more informed decisions.

Adding a metric to your success measure

To add a metric to a success measure:

1. On the success measure page, go to the Overview tab and look for the section titled Metric.

2. Select the Add metric button to either create a new metric (see more below) or use an existing metric from your organization.

3. Enter the details in the form.

Creating a new metric

When creating a new metric, you’ll have to enter a few pieces of information:

• Metric name — A specific, descriptive title to help distinguish this metric from others that may be similar. For example, instead of saying “Monthly Active Users (MAU)”, use “Jira MAU” instead to be more specific.

• Unit — This determines the type of target you’re looking to measure with this metric, whether it’s a number figure, percentage, currency, etc.

• Start value — This is the value you’d like the metric to start measuring progress from. Typically, this would be the present-day value or a 0, depending on how you’re structuring your metric. For example, if the goal is to increase subscriber count by 10%, the starting value would be the number of subscribers you have today.

• Target value — This is the value you are looking to reach with your metric, and will indicate whether you’ve achieved your goal. In the above example, if you have 1,000 subscribers and your goal is to increase that number by 10%, your target value is 1,100.

Once you’ve created a metric, you can adjust the name, start value, and target value at any time. To edit a metric, select the button next to your metric in the goal sidebar and select Settings.

How metrics contribute to a goal’s progress

Since a goal can have multiple success measures attached, you can use success measures to link several metrics to a single goal. By setting a target value for the metric and a target date for the success measure, you can track progress with each monthly update and see how the metric value changes over time.

Each success measure and its attached metric contributes to the overall progress percentage on a goal. The progress section in the right sidebar of a goal shows a progress bar and percentage that’s averaged from each success measure’s progress.

For example, a sales organization may have the goal, “Increase repeat customers in Q2”, they may want to track several success measures with metrics such as customer retention rate, customer satisfaction, and marketing email open rates. Assuming the goal has 3 success measures with these metrics attached, progress toward the target value for each success measure is averaged making up the progress percentage on the goal.

Best practices for using metrics

Though a single metric can be added to multiple goals, it’s best to only connect it to one active goal at a time to see how that goal’s efforts impact the metric. Instead, consider using sequential goals to track the same metric so each effort can track its individual impact on the metric.

When browsing the goals directory, you’ll see a new column for metrics titled Progress, helping you see each goals' progress at a glance. When you create your own saved view of the goals directory, you can use this column to see how each goal is progressing without having to look at each goal.