Abby Thompson

Software Goals

Led goal tracking in Compass from concept to ship, and owned Health end to end.

Product Designer Atlassian, Compass 2024 PM, EM and 12 engineers

Software Goals inside a Compass scorecard, with the goals banner above the scorecard statistics

Overview

I led design on Software Goals, a new framework inside Compass for defining and tracking engineering-health improvement work. It grew to 276 engaged teams with a 57.9% awareness-to-engagement conversion rate, and became the internal proof point for a feature Atlassian later took to customers.

Context

Compass is Atlassian's catalog for every software component in the company: every microservice, every library, tracked in one place. Our Engineering Health team used it to try to lift the quality of that software across the org, but had no systematic way to define, track, or report on that work.

The problem

  • No standard way for teams to define, track, or report on engineering improvement work
  • No consolidated view for leadership or non-technical PMs, just ad-hoc reporting
  • Manual data collection that made it hard to drive improvements at scale

External Compass customers had described the same problem. Solving it internally meant we were also prototyping a future customer-facing feature.

Constraints

  • Designing for two audiences at once: engineers who'd live in this daily, and leadership who'd only ever see a summary
  • No mandate to force adoption: 12 teams already had their own workarounds, so the feature had to earn trust rather than just exist
  • An internal experiment with external stakes: decisions here were likely to become the template for a customer-facing feature later

Process

Before any UI, I mapped how the two team types (teams who own a goal and teams who contribute to one) actually experienced the current manual process, and worked with engineering to define what a "Goal" needed to be as a data object so progress could sync cleanly across Compass and Atlassian Home.

  • A journey map of the existing driver team process, from finding the bar through to evaluating adherence, with quotes, touchpoints, pain points and an emotion line
  • A journey map of the receiving team process, with personas, actions, touchpoints, thoughts, pain points and opportunities across the flow
  • An object model diagram: a Goal with a status, a field and a scorecard metric, wired into Compass scorecards, components, metrics and fields
  • A FigJam board from a workshop with engineering, covered in sketched scorecard creation flows and sticky notes
The driver team's existing journey, from finding the bar through to evaluating adherence: every touchpoint, pain point and the emotion running under it

An early version of the flow only let a team pass or fail a goal outright. In working sessions it became clear teams needed a way to flag legitimate blockers instead of failing silently. That became the exemption workflow in the shipped version.

The solution

  • Centralised goal definition & visibility. The Engineering Health team could define and publish standardised goals in Compass, with key metrics tracked automatically. For stakeholders who didn't live in Compass, progress summaries surfaced in Atlassian Home.
  • Team-level tracking & accountability. Teams could monitor their own progress, understand their status, and request an exemption with justification when a goal genuinely didn't apply, balancing accountability with room for real context.
The Health section of Compass listing all software goals with their status, progress, due date, owner and scorecard
Every software goal in one place: status, progress, owner and the scorecard it is measured against

Impact

276 teams engaged

57.9% awareness to engagement conversion

2.5x lift in Health Details views

That uptake validated Software Goals as a real solution for operationalising software health internally, paving the way for its external rollout.

What I'd do differently

I'd instrument team-level engagement from day one rather than leaning on leadership-facing view counts. The 2.5x lift told us leadership was paying attention, but it took longer than it should have to see which teams were quietly disengaged versus genuinely blocked.

Want the full story: rollout sequencing, who we had to convince, what broke along the way?

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