14 customisable OKR examples for Engineers
What are Engineers 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 Engineers. 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 Engineers 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 Engineers OKRs examples
You'll find below a list of Objectives and Key Results templates for Engineers. We also included strategic projects for each template to make it easier to understand the difference between key results and projects.
Hope you'll find this helpful!
1. 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
2. OKRs to achieve promotion to software engineer 3
- Achieve promotion to software engineer 3
- Complete advanced software development certification
- Mentor and provide guidance to junior software engineers
- Schedule regular one-on-one meetings to discuss progress, challenges, and career goals
- Offer constructive feedback and actionable suggestions for improvement on their code
- Actively involve them in meaningful projects to gain real-world experience and build confidence
- Provide resources and recommend learning opportunities to enhance their technical skills
- Receive positive performance reviews from team members and supervisors
- Regularly check in with team members and supervisors to receive feedback and updates
- Actively listen to team members and supervisors, and address any concerns or suggestions
- Set clear and measurable goals with team members and supervisors
- Continuously improve skills and knowledge through training and professional development opportunities
- Deliver three high-impact software projects successfully
- Implement effective project management methodologies to ensure efficient coordination and communication
- Define clear project goals, timelines, and deliverables for each software project
- Assemble a skilled and dedicated team with the necessary expertise for each project
- Regularly monitor and evaluate progress, making adjustments as needed to meet project objectives
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 establish a proficient AI team with skilled ML engineers and product manager
- Establish a proficient AI team with skilled ML engineers and product manager
- Recruit an experienced AI product manager with a proven track record
- Reach out to AI professionals on LinkedIn
- Post the job ad on AI and tech-focused job boards
- Draft a compelling job description for the AI product manager role
- Conduct an effective onboarding program to integrate new hires into the team
- Arrange team building activities to promote camaraderie
- Develop a comprehensive orientation package for new hires
- Assign mentors to guide newcomers in their roles
- Interview and hire 5 qualified Machine Learning engineers
- Conduct interviews and evaluate candidates based on benchmarks
- Promote job vacancies on recruitment platforms and LinkedIn
- Develop detailed job descriptions for Machine Learning engineer positions
5. 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
6. 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
7. OKRs to mitigate the risk associated with software maintenance
- Mitigate the risk associated with software maintenance
- Implement efficient risk management model for 90% of maintenance projects
- Develop a comprehensive risk management model for maintenance projects
- Apply the model to current maintenance projects for evaluation
- Train project managers in risk management implementation
- Achieve zero unresolved critical issues for all maintained software
- Train staff in proactive problem identification and resolution
- Implement regular system checks for software performance
- Establish efficient issue reporting and resolution procedures
- Provide tailored training for all software engineers on identified critical areas
- Schedule and conduct tailored training sessions for engineers
- Develop customized training programs focusing on these critical areas
- Identify critical areas needing tailored training for software engineers
8. OKRs to tackle technical debt
- Tackle technical debt generated by feature rush
- Migrate 80% of projects to new UI library to reduce UI debt
- Reduce percentage of issues tagged as debt by 30%
- Reduce debt-related contact rate by 50%
9. OKRs to accelerate development via automation
- Accelerate development through automation
- 100% of repos have a Continuous Delivery pipeline
- Use Github Actions/Bitbucket Pipelines to automate deployments on every commit
- Create automated deployment scripts for all repos
- Increase code coverage from 30% to 60%
- Reduce cycle time from 8 days to 8h
- Reduce build time from 20min to 5min
- Audit tests to find areas of improvements
- Split tests to run in parallel when possible
10. 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
11. OKRs to implement efficient test automation processes
- Implement efficient test automation processes
- Reduce manual testing work by 40% through customized automated scripts
- Implement and monitor the automated scripts’ efficacy regularly
- Develop customized automated scripts for these processes
- Identify repeated manual testing processes suitable for automation
- Successfully automate 70% of all repetitive tests while maintaining accuracy
- Research suitable automation tools or software
- Implement, monitor, and adjust automated processes accordingly
- Identify and catalog all existing repetitive tests
- Achieve a 30% decrease in software bugs and glitches through automated testing enhancement
- Regularly evaluate and refine our testing processes
- Train developers in advanced automated testing
- Implement enhanced and rigorous automated testing protocols
12. OKRs to achieve great performance and reliability
- Achieve amazing performance with a world-class infrastructure
- Increase Apdex from 0.7 to 0.98
- Add a CDN in front of resources
- Implement caching wherever possible
- Minify scripts and CSS
- Improve crash free sessions from 75% to 95%
- Reduce core pages load time to be under 3s
- Reduce the number of paged issues by 40%
- Identify and fix top 10 recurring issues
13. OKRs to increase code quality
- Demonstrate incredible standards in code quality
- 100% of pull requests are reviewed by 2 developers
- 75% of the developers have gone through QA training
- 100% of repositories are using code linting and static code analysis
- Reduce the percentage of QA-related broken builds by 60%
14. OKRs to deliver great user experience
- Significantly improve the user experience through better performance
- Decrease the number of production exceptions by 45%
- Accelerate customer instance cold start time from 2min to 10s
- Reduce API response time from 900ms to 450ms
- Improve NPS from 15 to 35
Engineers 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
The #1 role of OKRs is to help you and your team focus on what really matters. Business-as-usual activities will still be happening, but you do not need to track your entire roadmap in the 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
Don't fall into the set-and-forget trap. It is important to adopt a weekly check-in process to get the full value of your OKRs and make your strategy agile – otherwise this is nothing more than a reporting exercise.
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 Engineers 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
We recommend using a spreadsheet for your first OKRs cycle. You'll need to get familiar with the scoring and tracking first. Then, you can scale your OKRs process by using a proper OKR-tracking tool for it.
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 Engineers OKR templates
We have more templates to help you draft your team goals and OKRs.
- OKRs to increase performance opportunities for musicians
- OKRs to deepen understanding of customer needs
- OKRs to cultivate an inclusive and engaging work environment for all employees
- OKRs to improve search engine rankings for targeted keywords
- OKRs to enhance productivity with increased automation and streamlined administration
- OKRs to improve Efficiency of O&KR Maintenance Operations
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
You can use Tability to create OKRs with AI – and keep yourself accountable 👀
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