Engineering leaders face a common challenge: connecting daily development work to strategic objectives. While OKRs provide an excellent framework for goal-setting, the gap between high-level objectives and ground-level execution often remains frustratingly wide. This disconnect isn't just an inconvenience – it's a major obstacle to achieving meaningful organizational outcomes.

The True Cost of Limited Visibility

When engineering teams lack clear visibility into how their daily tasks ladder up to broader objectives, several problems emerge:

- Teams lose sight of the strategic impact of their work, leading to decreased motivation

- Resources get misallocated to lower-priority initiatives

- Leaders struggle to make data-driven decisions about team capacity and priorities

- Progress reporting becomes a time-consuming manual process

The key to solving these challenges is creating seamless connections between strategic objectives and tactical execution. This is where modern engineering management platforms are transforming how teams operate.

Bridging the Strategy-Execution Gap

Features like Zenhub's new Sub-issues, goals, and Planning Panel represent a significant evolution in how engineering teams can structure their work. By creating clear hierarchies from objectives to individual tasks, teams can finally maintain a line of sight from strategy to execution.

How the Goals and Planning Panel Works

The Goals and Planning Panel is a feature that can be accessed directly on the Zenhub board. It allows leaders and individual contributors to see the progress of high-level goals and objectives in real time by consolidating and showing the progress of all of the work below that goal.

You can filter the goals and objectives by workspace or organization. Expanding one of these objectives shows all of the issues below it. Then, you can filter the board by the specific goals to see the daily tasks contributing to them. This makes it lightning-fast to navigate from your OKRs right down to your team’s daily tasks, all in one place.

Here’s a quick tutorial from Zenhub’s VP of Product, George Champlin-Scharff:

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Using Sub-issues and the Goals and Planning Panel offers an accurate hierarchical way to organize work and gain better visibility through improved organization.

This approach offers several key advantages:

1. Clear Context: Developers understand how their tasks contribute to larger initiatives

2. Flexible Organization: Work can be organized by both strategic priorities and technical requirements

3. Automated Rollup: Progress at the task level automatically reflects in higher-level reporting, Including the Goals and Planning Panel.

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Making OKRs Work

The real power of improved visibility comes from how it transforms OKR implementation. Instead of quarterly objectives existing in isolation, they become living, breathing guides for daily work. Engineering leaders can:

- Track progress toward objectives in real-time

- Identify bottlenecks before they impact deadlines

- Make data-driven decisions about resource allocation

- Demonstrate engineering's strategic value to stakeholders

The Future of Engineering Leadership

As engineering organizations grow more complex and distributed, maintaining clear visibility across all levels of work will become increasingly crucial. Leaders who embrace tools and processes that connect strategy to execution will be better positioned to deliver consistent results and drive meaningful business impact.

Remember: visibility isn't just about tracking progress – it's about enabling better decision-making, improving team alignment, and ultimately delivering more value to your organization.

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