Even when the stakes are high and with millions on the table, organizations fail to deliver on business strategy. Why? Because they're operating in the dark. The information they need to make decisions is buried under mountains of data scattered across tools—spreadsheets, slide decks, BI systems—you name it.
Leaders face more questions than answers. Are teams focused on the right priorities? Do we have enough resources? Are we pouring money into the right places?
Atlassian identified a need to help organizations bring business strategy to life with actionable insights, and their new tool, Atlassian Focus, delivers exactly that. In this article, we unpack how Atlassian Focus works and how the app provides enterprise leaders with the clarity, connection, and context to deliver better outcomes.
What is Atlassian Focus?
Atlassian Focus, which forms part of the Strategy Collection, acts as a central hub, giving enterprise leaders a comprehensive view of how teams, work, goals, and funds ladder up to strategic priorities.
Focus provides visibility into how execution is progressing against a company’s highest-level goals. But Atlassian is also maintaining flexibility in their approach to the app with flexible hierarchies, custom views, and many other capabilities, like the ability to:
- Cascade strategic priorities
- Tie work directly to desired outcomes
- Get the summary without the live meeting
- Review financial and performance metrics in one place
While Jira Align has always been amazing at demonstrating the connection from strategy to execution, it demands rigidity and lacks flexible reporting without the use of Enterprise Insights. Atlassian’s Focus complements the best parts of Jira Align and introduces more and different ways to provide executive visibility. Aggregating outcomes, progress, and budgets, organizations can gain an instantaneous view across products, projects, people, or all of the above to empower data-driven decisions.
"Focus complements Jira Align’s enterprise planning capabilities by connecting strategic priorities to structured goals, all work, supporting teams, and associated funds." -Atlassian
How Atlassian Focus Works
By pulling in all work from Jira and Jira Align, Focus offers the flexibility modern enterprises need and connects high-level priorities to everything happening under the hood. This enables leaders to track how teams are progressing toward strategy, see what’s working and what’s not, fund the right moves, and make sharper decisions with context-rich insights.
Here’s how Atlassian Focus helps decision-makers win at the strategic planning process:
1. A One-Stop Shop for Strategic Priorities
Focus serves as a command center for business leaders to see how products, projects, people, funds, or all of the above connect to high-level strategy. But this isn’t just about data points. Focus Areas offer qualitative insights so you get both numbers and context you need to make smart decisions within a few clicks.
Need clarity on how a specific goal is tracking, what’s working, and what’s not? Focus pulls it all together, so you can determine if you are using your resources wisely and know where to direct your attention.
2. Focus Area Maps: Big-Picture Views and Drill-Down Detail
With Focus Area maps, you no longer have to guess where progress is happening (or stalling). These maps enable leaders to have a bird’s eye view of how work is progressing and if something looks off, they can zoom in on the nitty-gritty details.
Another visualization feature is the ability to easily group together the Focus Areas to see what’s important to them and how strategic priorities relate to one another. By bringing together totally disparate portions of goals, people, work, and funds across the entire platform, Focus provides a clear view of what matters to you. For example, a PPM may want to know a slice of information that concerns his or her budget and people, which he or she can do with – regardless of how the strategy is structured in the tool.
3. Build Your Business Strategy Your Way
Another flex from Atlassian Focus? It’s flexibility. Organizations have the freedom to structure their strategy however it makes sense for them. Allowing as many Focus Area hierarchies as you need, Focus lets you build your strategy your way—top to bottom, in your own language, and on your own terms. As your enterprise evolves (because nothing stays still for long), Focus makes it easy to adjust your strategy model.
Whether it’s from Jira, Jira Align, or both, you can also pull in work from multiple instances and tools–you decide. On top of this, you can input work from Jira Align into Focus without disrupting work hierarchies of the portfolio epics.
In the future, Focus will also seamlessly integrate with your third-party work management tools, bringing in data from across your tech stack and creating a single source of truth for all leaders and teams.
4. Notifications That Actually Matter
It’s easy to lose track of priorities when you’re juggling a million responsibilities. With Focus, business leaders can stay on top of their game with smart notifications in Microsoft Teams or Slack. Not only does it alert you to changes that need your attention, but it also delivers a summary of key Focus Areas, progress updates, and even suggestions for proactive problem-solving.
5. Bite-Sized Updates
Business leaders don’t always have time to dig into all things strategy or check on Focus Areas on the daily. Instead, you can save time by using Atlassian Intelligence to get quick summaries of your Focus Areas and proactive insights about what needs your attention.
6. OKRs, Simplified
Tracking objectives and key results (OKRs) across multiple teams and departments can feel impossible. Not with Focus, which gives you one place to track OKRs against specific priorities, how work is progressing towards OKRs, and where you need to course-correct if a goal derails. Updates reflect in real-time across Atlassian tools, so there’s no confusion.
Focus + Jira Align: The Business Strategy Dream Team
The magic of Focus also lies in how it works with Jira Align. Focus gives leaders a bird’s-eye view of strategic priorities, budgets, and progress, while Jira Align connects all the granular moving parts—planning, tracking, and delivery—to those bigger goals.
Jira Align excels at operationalizing work to align with strategic goals, but it can feel a little too rigid. Focus brings flexibility, allowing leaders to slice and dice data across priority areas, initiatives, and budgets with just a few clicks, all without disrupting team workflows. By creating views that cross-cut Focus Areas, you can instantly see how execution work ties to high-level strategy.
Focus pulls insights directly from Jira Align, delivering a comprehensive view of outcomes, risks, and impact. If you need more detailed insights, you can combine Atlassian Analytics with Enterprise Insights to bring work execution to the forefront. This empowers leaders with the clarity they need to make smarter, faster decisions and guide their organizations with confidence, precision, and purpose.
Read our Atlassian FAQ article to learn more about the differences between Focus and Jira Align.
Behind the Scenes: Developing Atlassian's New Enterprise Strategy and Planning Solution
Since our inception in 2008, Praecipio has partnered with Atlassian to provide tools, coaching, and expertise to some of the world's leading brands. Our continued investment in our partnership with Atlassian has afforded us cutting-edge solutions for our clients’ most complex problems.
We’ve had the privilege of being deeply involved in developing Focus, drawing on years of experience working with enterprise clients who struggle to answer: “Are we on track?” We collaborated closely with Atlassian’s product design team, offering feedback that helped shape Focus into a powerful visibility solution for business leaders.
Praecipio is uniquely positioned to assist you immediately with understanding and deploying Jira Align and Focus in your Atlassian environments.
From Strategic Vision to Reality
As Atlassian’s biggest investment in enterprise strategy and planning since Jira Align, Focus redefines enterprise visibility for modern organizations. With Focus, you get the right people on the right goals with the right resources, ensuring your company gains a competitive advantage and stays aligned with customer needs.
If connecting strategy to execution is on your 2025 vision board, contact our team to learn more about how we can help bring your strategic vision to life by maximizing visibility across your organization.
