Microsoft retired Viva Goals on December 31, 2025. If you are reading this while evaluating what comes next, you are in good company — thousands of organisations are in exactly the same position, and most of the obvious replacement vendors are queueing up at your procurement door this quarter.
Here is the piece of advice nobody else is going to give you: do not just replace Viva Goals. Replace the architecture. If you only replace the tool, you will be running a different version of the same migration project in 2027.
Why Viva Goals actually failed
Viva Goals failed for the same reason most OKR tools struggle, amplified by Microsoft's specific context. The product tracked goal syntax — OKRs, in this case — inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It integrated with Teams, Planner and Viva Insights. It had a usable interface and the credibility of the Microsoft brand. By any reasonable feature checklist, it should have worked.
What it could not do was answer the question that actually matters: is the work happening inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem actually moving the goals? The goals lived in Viva Goals. The work lived in Planner, Project, Azure DevOps, Jira, Asana, half a dozen team-specific tools, and the inboxes of people who never opened any of them. The integrations moved data between systems, but data movement is not the same as architectural unity.
That is not a Microsoft problem. It is a category problem. Viva Goals was built on the assumption that goal visibility creates goal execution. It does not. Goals that exist in one system and work that exists in another — even when they are connected by integrations — cannot give you real-time traceability. Integrations move data. They do not move accountability. And the tool that you choose to replace Viva Goals will have the same structural limitation if you let it.
The mistake most evaluations make
The standard Viva Goals replacement evaluation looks like this. List the features of Viva Goals you were actually using. Find tools that replicate those features. Run two or three demos. Pick the one with the best UX and the most agreeable pricing. Migrate your OKRs into the new system. Done.
This process will produce a new tool with the same architecture — goal layer on top, work layer below, integrations in the middle — and the same execution gap twelve months from now. You will have spent six months on a migration project to arrive in the same place you started, just with a different logo on the dashboard.
The better evaluation process starts with a different question entirely: why did our strategy fail to execute under Viva Goals? Not "which features did we use?" — that is a feature-replacement project. The question is structural, and the answer should drive what you buy next.
The three questions worth asking before you pick anything
Before you sit down with a vendor, ask your CoS or COO three questions and listen carefully to the answers.
"What percentage of our goals last quarter had a single named owner?" If the answer is less than 70%, the execution gap is not a tooling problem. It is an ownership problem. A new tool will not solve it unless the tool structurally enforces single ownership — makes shared ownership the explicit exception requiring justification, not the comfortable default.
"Could anyone in leadership, on a given Monday morning, say which work was actively moving our top three KRs?" If the honest answer is no — if answering required a status meeting or a chief-of-staff investigation — the gap between goals and work was not being bridged at all. The new tool needs to bridge it natively, not via a weekly integration sync.
"When a KR turned amber, how long did it take leadership to identify the root cause?" If the answer is "at the quarterly review" or "when somebody raised it in the leadership sync," the gap cost you four to eight weeks of lead time. The new tool needs to make root causes visible in the system, not surfaceable in a meeting that happens to occur.
If your honest answers to these three questions are uncomfortable, congratulations — you now know what your migration actually needs to solve. Probably not the same thing the vendor demos are showing you.
What an actual replacement looks like
The architecture that closes the gaps above has three properties, and most of the Viva Goals alternatives have one or two of them at best.
Single-owner goals, structurally enforced. Not just a field labelled "owner" with a free-text default. A system design that makes shared ownership the exception requiring explicit justification, not the comfortable default everyone picks because it avoids a difficult conversation. Every goal: one accountable owner. Contributors: explicit, separate, visible.
Native work layer. Work items live in the same system as the goals they are supposed to move. Not synced. Not integrated. The same system. When work stalls, goals surface it automatically. When goals turn amber, leadership can drill to the work — and see who owns it, what its current state is, and whether the right capacity is behind it. Without leaving the screen.
Bandwidth accounting. New initiatives require naming the capacity they consume. The system surfaces when adding a new goal creates an overcommitment somewhere downstream. Leadership approves bets with full visibility into what those bets cost in real human attention, not in abstract priority scores.
The honest evaluation criteria
| What to check | What to ask | What a good answer looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Goal ownership | Is shared ownership the default or the exception? | Single owner is the default; shared requires explicit override |
| Work connection | Where do work items live — native or integrated? | Native, same system, not linked via sync |
| Root cause visibility | When a KR is amber, how do I find out why? | Drill from goal to work in seconds, no meeting required |
| Bandwidth | Can I see overcommitment before approving a new initiative? | Yes — capacity view shows allocations per person |
| Framework lock-in | Am I forced into one goal syntax? | No — OKRs, KPIs, OGSM, Rocks all supported |
If the vendor demo cannot answer those five questions in the room, the demo is theatre. Walk out.
The Vindaris view
We built Vindaris on the architectural premise that Viva Goals and its peers got wrong: goals and the work that proves them belong in one system, not two, not three connected by integrations. We are goal-syntax-agnostic — bring your OKRs, KPIs, OGSM, EOS Rocks, whatever you were running in Viva Goals. The framework is yours. What we own is the layer that connects every goal to traceable work, and surfaces where the connection has broken before the quarter ends and the post-mortem starts.
The migration from Viva Goals is a one-time chance to solve the problem Viva Goals never solved. Take it. Or do not, and run the migration project again in 2027 with a different vendor logo on the same slides.