Atlassian Focus FAQ

Atlassian Focus is a platform that acts as a central hub, giving enterprise leaders a comprehensive view of how teams, work, goals, and funds connect to strategic priorities.

Focus brings people, work, and financial data together and turns themes into Focus Areas so organizations can see different perspectives of business outcomes. By pulling in all work from Jira and Jira Align, Focus offers the flexibility modern enterprises need while connecting the dots, so leaders can clearly see the big picture and act confidently. Take a look at some of our resources on Atlassian Focus to learn more about how the platform works.  

Focus is designed for business leaders that define organizational strategy and make decisions around investments and resources. Common roles include C-Suite executives, VP/SVPs, Portfolio Leaders, Program Managers, and Director of Portfolio Management, just to name a few. 

Focus went GA on February 25, 2025. Reach out to the Praecipio team, and we will be happy to walk you through how to acquire Focus! 

If you are a current Jira Align customer, we can help you work with Atlassian to enable Focus in your instance.

Yes, Focus is for Cloud customers only.

No, Focus is part of an enterprise strategy and planning product bundle, which includes Focus, Jira Align, and Enterprise Insights (more information coming at Team 25). 

Feel free to reach out to Praecipio, and we can help you navigate your licensing questions, pricing, and services.

If you're an existing Jira Align customer, you need to request Focus from Atlassian and work with an Atlassian Solution Partner to implement the tool. 

No, Focus is part of a bundle of enterprise strategy and planning products that include Jira Align, Focus, and Enterprise Insights (more information coming at Team 25). While you need the entire bundle to access Focus, you don’t have to use or implement Jira Align if it’s not the right fit for your organization. 

Pricing stays the same, $129 per user per month billed annually with a minimum of 50 licenses.

When you purchase 50 Jira Align licenses, you’ll receive 200 integrated users who can move data from Jira to Jira Align. Focus, on the other hand, has its own user accounts and includes standard roles such as User and User Admin. 

The key difference lies in how the two tools serve different aspects of connecting strategy to execution. Jira Align excels at coordinating execution work across multiple lines of business and portfolios, offering a comprehensive view from planning to execution. It’s particularly strong in structured methodologies and strategic portfolio management. However, its strategy room is not typically a space where executive leadership spends their time.

Focus, on the other hand, is designed to provide a more accessible and high-level view of everything happening in relation to an organization’s strategic pillars. It helps align work with strategy in a way that is straightforward and easy for leadership to digest. 

Focus also enhances this overview by providing detailed financial insights and the ability to connect efforts across teams, even those outside of Jira Align's scope, such as legal, HR, or marketing. This makes Focus the ultimate complement to organizations looking to integrate broader strategic visibility into their processes.

Atlassian Focus provides a framework to support goal-setting and OKR alignment by integrating key data and enabling visibility across tools. Within Focus, you can define and set your goals, creating a foundation for alignment with broader organizational capabilities and roadmaps. 

For instance, if you're using Atlassian Home to track goals, you can bring that data into Focus and tie it to execution work in Jira Align. You can also take data from Focus, connect it with your Jira Align data through Enterprise Insights, and then put it in Atlassian Analytics or a PowerBi solution as well. This enables you to create custom dashboards, helping you see how your goals and OKRs align with current roadmaps and organizational priorities.

No, the Goals functionality is not moving to Focus. Atlassian is simply unifying the object definition across the platform. Goals still live in Atlassian Home (formerly known as Atlas). However, you can bring goal data into Focus.

Yes, you can connect goals from Atlassian Home (formerly known as Atlas) to Focus areas, or they can exist independently within Focus. What’s unique about Focus is how it displays goal hierarchies brought over from Atlas, allowing you to see a clear, structured view of your goals within the Focus Area.

Focus allows you to create Focus Areas, which may align with strategic themes in Jira Align. By connecting work from Jira and/or Jira Align into one Focus Area, you can unify all related efforts. This may include work traditionally linked in Jira Align and additional “hidden” work from other teams not integrated into Jira Align, providing a broader perspective.

For instance, a strategic theme like “Innovation” may encompass a 3–5-year roadmap, extending beyond immediate program increments (PIs). By consolidating data in Focus, you capture a more comprehensive view of goals, tasks, and outcomes tied to that long-term strategy.

Ultimately, themes can exist in both places, but Focus helps unify and expand their scope to include work that may not sit within Jira Align’s hierarchy.

Focus is simple and straightforward, but without a solid plan, things can get messy fast. You can’t just input information and make random connections in the tool; you take a structured approach to planning to get everyone on the same page and ensure every move makes sense for your strategy. 

Before implementing Focus, have thorough discussions about key elements like Focus Areas and Sub-Focus Areas. Questions to address include: How many layers of the strategy hierarchy do you need? What work instances should connect to each Sub-Focus Area? How will you define and structure goals, and should they align with an OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework?

Setting up Focus isn’t overly burdensome from an administrative perspective, but it does require significant collaboration. Plan for whiteboarding sessions, hard conversations, and detailed modeling. Engage your executive leadership team and ensure your approach makes sense to them since they are the ones that drive strategy. They may provide feedback that prompts adjustments or even a rework of your initial design.

To make the strategy development process successful, it’s essential to bring together key team members—including your executive leadership—to discuss and align on how you drive business. If your organization operates through value streams, these serve as the execution mechanism that delivers value back to the business. However, a well-designed strategy ensures that these value streams are connected to broader goals.

To start, define what your high-level strategy is aiming to achieve. For example, is it tied to innovation? Sustainability? Break down these overarching goals into actionable Sub-Focus Areas. At this stage, Focus allows you to link execution data, such as value streams, to these Sub-Focus Areas, making the progress of your strategy visible and measurable.

It’s important to keep in mind that this strategy hierarchy is not a work hierarchy. This is a common misconception, especially for teams familiar with tools like Jira Align or Plans, which tend to focus on how work is executed. Instead, Focus encourages you to think beyond delivery and execution. The goal is to understand what drives your business at a strategic level and how those drivers align with your organization’s vision.

By mapping value streams to Focus Areas, Focus bridges the gap between high-level strategy and execution. It helps contextualize what executives communicate during updates, town halls, or annual planning sessions. This way, you’re not just focused on delivering work but also on aligning every level of execution to what genuinely drives the business forward.

Managing end-to-end dependencies within the strategy hierarchy involves creating a clear connection between outcomes, strategic themes, and execution at various levels. At the top of the strategy hierarchy, you have your high-level objectives or "big picture" goals. These are the overarching priorities your organization is working toward, like innovation, sustainability, or growth. These high-level goals often tie to multiple strategic themes, forming a foundation for everything below.

Now, as you move down the hierarchy, these strategic themes break into more detailed layers, eventually linking to actionable outcomes at the execution level. For example, an outcome or initiative at a lower level (say, Level 4) might support one or more objectives at a higher level (Level 2) and feed back into your top-level goals.

To manage these connections and ensure visibility, you can leverage tools to create custom views in Focus that map these dependencies across levels. These views allow you to see how individual execution efforts align with broader strategies. For instance, you might want to understand how a project in one area contributes to a specific strategic theme while supporting other initiatives. With a well-structured view, you can identify these cross-cutting relationships and make informed decisions.

If you want to know more about the ins and outs of Focus and you would like to get an instance spun up, reach out to Praecipio, and we will work with Atlassian to make that happen. 

Yes, Focus is designed for flexibility and can accommodate as many layers of strategy as your organization needs. 

Yes, you can. However, it’s not about connecting the entire Plan itself. Instead, you want to link the top-level items in your Plan’s hierarchy (such as initiatives or portfolio epics) to Focus Areas. Whatever you’ve defined as the top layer above Jira Software epics can be brought into Focus and aligned with strategic objectives.

The goal of this connection is to align your highest-priority work with your organizational strategy. For example, you might tie an initiative to a Focus Area such as “Innovation.” This approach helps leadership get a clear view of how strategy is being executed without getting bogged down in the details.

After all, Focus is designed for executive leaders. It’s not about tracking every subtask or granular detail. If you need to drill down further, you can always click into an item like an initiative, which will take you back to the Plan or Jira for deeper details. But for Focus, the idea is to provide a high-level overview. By tying the top-level items in your Plan to Focus Areas, you get a real-time snapshot of execution status, making it easy to track progress without losing sight of the bigger picture.

Focus integrates seamlessly with Atlassian tools like Jira Align and Jira Software, as well as Slack and Microsoft Teams, which helps notify business leaders when something needs their attention. Atlassian continuously updates its products, and we expect to hear more about new features and third-party integrations at Team 25.