15 customisable OKR examples for Engineering
What are Engineering OKRs?
The OKR acronym stands for Objectives and Key Results. It's a goal-setting framework that was introduced at Intel by Andy Grove in the 70s, and it became popular after John Doerr introduced it to Google in the 90s. OKRs helps teams has a shared language to set ambitious goals and track progress towards them.
OKRs are quickly gaining popularity as a goal-setting framework. But, it's not always easy to know how to write your goals, especially if it's your first time using OKRs.
To aid you in setting your goals, we have compiled a collection of OKR examples customized for Engineering. Take a look at the templates below for inspiration and guidance.
If you want to learn more about the framework, you can read our OKR guide online.
Building your own Engineering OKRs with AI
While we have some examples available, it's likely that you'll have specific scenarios that aren't covered here. You can use our free AI generator below or our more complete goal-setting system to generate your own OKRs.
Feel free to explore our tools:
- Use our free OKR generator
- Use Tability, a complete platform to set and track OKRs and initiatives, including a GPT-4 powered goal generator
Our customisable Engineering OKRs examples
You will find in the next section many different Engineering Objectives and Key Results. We've included strategic initiatives in our templates to give you a better idea of the different between the key results (how we measure progress), and the initiatives (what we do to achieve the results).
Hope you'll find this helpful!
1. OKRs to foster continuous improvement on Engineering metrics
Foster continuous improvement on Engineering metrics
Achieve a 10% increase in team's average productivity metrics
Introduce incentives for meeting or surpassing productivity goals- Implement training sessions to improve skills and efficiency
- Optimize workflow by eliminating unnecessary procedures
- Implement weekly trend analysis reports for every team member
- Schedule and distribute weekly trend analysis to each team member
- Establish report templates to track weekly trends for each team
- Automate data collection and trend analysis processes
- Reduce error rates in engineering processes by 15%
- Enhance quality control and testing procedures
- Regularly review and improve existing engineering processes
- Implement training programs to update engineering knowledge and skills
2. OKRs to improve engineering performance and reliability
- Build a world-class infrastructure
- Increase Apdex above 0.95
- Cache requests wherever possible
- Identify and resolve to 5 application bottlenecks
- Reduce build time to be under 5 minutes
- Audit test suite to reduce duplicates
- Switch to a more performing build infrastructure
- Our stress tests show that we can support 10,000 concurrent users
3. OKRs to improve the quality of the data
- Significantly improve the quality of the data
- Reduce the number of data capture errors by 30%
- Reduce delay for data availability from 24h to 4h
- Close top 10 issues relating to data accuracy
4. OKRs to improve interoperability between data engineering teams
- Improve interoperability between data engineering teams
- Offer biweekly data interoperability training to 90% of data engineering teams
- Identify 90% of data engineering teams for training
- Develop a biweekly interoperability training schedule
- Implement and monitor the data interoperability training
- Reduce cross-team data discrepancies by 50%, ensuring increased data consistency
- Regularly audit and correct data discrepancies across all teams
- Implement a standardized data entry and management process for all teams
- Utilize data synchronization tools for seamless data integration
- Implement standardized data protocols across all teams increasing cross-collaboration by 30%
- Train teams on new standardized protocols
- Identify current data protocols in each team
- Draft and propose unified data protocols
5. OKRs to reduce the cost of integrating data sources
- Reduce the cost of data integration
- Decrease the time to integrate new data sources from 2 days to 4h
- Migrate data sources to Segment
- Create a shared library to streamline integrations
- Reduce the time to create new dashboards from 4 days to <1h
- Adopt BI tool to allow users to create their own dashboards
- 10 teams have used successfully a self-serve dashboard creation system
6. OKRs to enhance workflow efficiency and productivity
- Enhance workflow efficiency and productivity
- Implement at least 3 significant improvements identified from the workflow analysis
- Develop strategies to implement these improvements efficiently
- Evaluate success of implemented improvements periodically
- Prioritize the 3 top improvements identified from workflow analysis
- Reduce workflow steps or stages by 10% to streamline operations
- Implement new workflow and analyze for efficiency improvement
- Review and analyze current processes for unnecessary stages
- Develop a revised workflow eliminating redundant steps
- Increase process efficiency by 20% through process re-engineering
- Identify bottlenecks in the current process
- Train staff on newly engineered process
- Develop a streamlined process blueprint
7. OKRs to allocate resources to refactor high-priority tech debt
- Reduce technical debt by allocating resources effectively
- Implement best practices to avoid future high-priority tech debt accumulation
- Achieve a reduction in high-priority tech debt items by 25%
- Establish a clear plan for refactoring high-priority tech debt items
- Prioritize high-priority tech debt items for resource allocation
8. OKRs to improve engineering release cycles
- Significantly increase the speed of our development cycle
- Improve developer NPS from 20 to 60
- Reduce build times from 25 to under 5 mins
- Reduce cycle time from 28 days to 6 days
- Implement CD pipeline for the staging environment
- Automate all deployment steps
9. OKRs to enhance data engineering capabilities to drive software innovation
- Enhance data engineering capabilities to drive software innovation
- Improve data quality by implementing automated data validation and monitoring processes
- Implement chosen data validation tool
- Research various automated data validation tools
- Regularly monitor and assess data quality
- Enhance software scalability by optimizing data storage and retrieval mechanisms for large datasets
- Optimize SQL queries for faster data retrieval
- Adopt a scalable distributed storage system
- Implement a more efficient database indexing system
- Increase data processing efficiency by optimizing data ingestion pipelines and reducing processing time
- Develop optimization strategies for lagging pipelines
- Implement solutions to reduce data processing time
- Analyze current data ingestion pipelines for efficiency gaps
10. OKRs to achieve optimal efficiency in engineering operations
- Achieve optimal efficiency in engineering operations
- Lower engineering error rates by 10% through enhanced quality control measures
- Regularly monitor and review error reports
- Conduct regular training for quality control measures
- Implement rigorous testing protocols for every engineering process
- Reduce operation downtime by 20% through improved preventative maintenance procedures
- Implement strict equipment servicing and inspection schedules
- Develop detailed preventative maintenance protocols
- Train personnel in efficient troubleshooting techniques
- Increase operational efficiency by 15% via process improvement initiatives
- Implement new strategies to streamline processes
- Regularly assess and adjust improvements for optimal efficiency
- Identify inefficiencies in current operational procedures
11. OKRs to reduce critical tech debt by 50% in six months
- Minimize tech debt
- Develop a plan of action to address targeted tech debt items
- Prioritize critical tech debt items
- Conduct a thorough tech debt analysis
- Implement new development standards to prevent tech debt accumulation
12. OKRs to improve software engineering skills through effective time management
- Improve software engineering skills through effective time management
- Increase the number of completed coding tasks by 20% each week
- Identify and address any obstacles or challenges that may hinder coding task completion
- Enhance collaboration and communication among team members for efficient task completion
- Provide regular feedback and support to assist in completing coding tasks
- Set clear and achievable coding task goals for each team member
- Improve adherence to project deadlines by delivering work on time in 90% of cases
- Implement effective communication strategies to address obstacles and ensure timely completion
- Set clear and realistic deadlines for each project task
- Prioritize tasks and create a detailed schedule to ensure timely delivery
- Regularly track progress and provide updates to stakeholders to maintain accountability
- Reduce time spent on non-essential activities by 15% during work hours
- Set specific time limits for non-essential tasks to ensure efficient completion
- Prioritize and eliminate non-essential activities based on their impact and importance
- Identify non-essential activities taking up significant time during work hours
- Regularly assess and adjust the allocation of time to non-essential activities as needed
- Attend and actively participate in at least 2 time management workshops or webinars
- Research and identify 2 time management workshops or webinars
- Apply the learned time management techniques in daily activities for improved efficiency
- Take thorough notes during the workshops or webinars for future reference
- Register for the selected workshops or webinars to secure a spot
13. OKRs to eliminate high-risk tech debt over the next year
- Reduce high-risk tech debt to improve system stability
- Conduct a thorough analysis to measure the impact of eliminating each high-risk tech debt item
- Outline and prioritize initiatives to eliminate each high-risk tech debt item
- Complete the elimination of at least 50% of high-risk tech debt items
- Identify top 10 high-risk tech debt items
14. OKRs to reduce technical debt
- Reduce significantly the technical debt in our platform
- Dedicated 20% of our sprint effort to tackling technical debt
- Close 40 issues tagged as technical debt
- Boost application performance by 40% as a result of the debt culling
15. OKRs to enforce coding standards to prevent new tech debt
- Standardize coding practices for debt reduction
- Conduct training sessions to educate all team members
- Reduce tech debt backlog by 50% through enforcement of standards
- Develop and implement updated coding standards
- Conduct quarterly reviews to ensure adherence to standards
Engineering OKR best practices to boost success
Generally speaking, your objectives should be ambitious yet achievable, and your key results should be measurable and time-bound (using the SMART framework can be helpful). It is also recommended to list strategic initiatives under your key results, as it'll help you avoid the common mistake of listing projects in your KRs.
Here are a couple of best practices extracted from our OKR implementation guide 👇
Tip #1: Limit the number of key results
Focus can only be achieve by limiting the number of competing priorities. It is crucial that you take the time to identify where you need to move the needle, and avoid adding business-as-usual activities to your OKRs.
We recommend having 3-4 objectives, and 3-4 key results per objective. A platform like Tability can run audits on your data to help you identify the plans that have too many goals.
Tability's audit dashboard will highlight opportunities to improve OKRsTip #2: Commit to weekly OKR check-ins
Having good goals is only half the effort. You'll get significant more value from your OKRs if you commit to a weekly check-in process.
Being able to see trends for your key results will also keep yourself honest.
Tability's check-ins will save you hours and increase transparencyTip #3: No more than 2 yellow statuses in a row
Yes, this is another tip for goal-tracking instead of goal-setting (but you'll get plenty of OKR examples above). But, once you have your goals defined, it will be your ability to keep the right sense of urgency that will make the difference.
As a rule of thumb, it's best to avoid having more than 2 yellow/at risk statuses in a row.
Make a call on the 3rd update. You should be either back on track, or off track. This sounds harsh but it's the best way to signal risks early enough to fix things.
How to turn your Engineering OKRs in a strategy map
OKRs without regular progress updates are just KPIs. You'll need to update progress on your OKRs every week to get the full benefits from the framework. Reviewing progress periodically has several advantages:
- It brings the goals back to the top of the mind
- It will highlight poorly set OKRs
- It will surface execution risks
- It improves transparency and accountability
Most teams should start with a spreadsheet if they're using OKRs for the first time. Then, once you get comfortable you can graduate to a proper OKRs-tracking tool.
Tability's Strategy Map makes it easy to see all your org's OKRsIf you're not yet set on a tool, you can check out the 5 best OKR tracking templates guide to find the best way to monitor progress during the quarter.
More Engineering OKR templates
We have more templates to help you draft your team goals and OKRs.
- OKRs to boost frequency of customer repeat purchases
- OKRs to meet or exceed financial and operational milestones for investor confidence
- OKRs to enhance operational efficiency across all workflows
- OKRs to efficiently meet annual audit plan commitments
- OKRs to increase test automation percentage to 80%
- OKRs to improve OKR implementation and effectiveness
OKRs resources
Here are a list of resources to help you adopt the Objectives and Key Results framework.
- To learn: What is the meaning of OKRs
- Blog posts: ODT Blog
- Success metrics: KPIs examples
Create more examples in our app
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