Microsoft have announced that Viva Goals, their OKR tool, will be retired on December 31st, 2025 and that all new feature development ceased on December 4th, 2024.
The reason for this is that “overall adoption and usage of Viva Goals across the Viva Suite customer base hasn’t grown. Microsoft has been unable to reach the scale and impact needed to continue further investment“. This also means that Microsoft aren’t replacing Goals with another OKR tool so customers need to look at 3rd-party solution. If you email GoalsDecom@microsoft.com, Microsoft will offer help in that regard. The full FAQ page is here.
Microsoft say:
- Continued access:Â Viva Goals will continue to be available to our existing customers until December 31, 2025, to provide you with an opportunity to plan for its end-of-life transition to other OKR solutions if desired. We will continue to maintain Viva Goals’ availability, accessibility, and security of the product, and provide product support until its retirement.
- No new functionality Viva Goals will no longer add any new features or functionality to the product. All current design change requests (DCRs) will be closed and no new DCRs will be accepted.
- Data migration options: Viva Goals offers data export features via API, Excel, and PowerPoint, allowing users to move their data to a solution of their choice. we recommend that users export their data before December 31, 2025.
They are keen to point out that they are still committed to the rest of the Viva Suite and further development and investment will continue.
I was quite excited about the launch of Viva Goals as I think the OKR model makes a lot of sense for businesses and being able to integrate it into Teams etc. seemed powerful. I wonder whether the failure of Viva Goals is due to Microsoft’s technology or perhaps simply that the OKR methodology isn’t widespread enough for a dedicated tool to reach critical mass?
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 