5 Best OKR Examples for Engineering Teams

Objectives and Key Results or OKRs form a collaborative goal-setting tool implemented by engineering teams to set ambitious goals with measurable outcomes. The OKR methodology helps create an environment where engineers work with a purpose.

How else do you think Google could develop Chrome, the next-gen client for web apps, and let it reach 20 million 7-day active users, or Jeff Weiner led LinkedIn through a successful IPO, resulting in the market capitalization of over $20 billion?

Looking at these powerful OKR examples, there is no doubt that OKRs have become an essential ingredient for business growth and development.

Since engineers develop the core product, forming the crux of the business, they cannot falter in quality. That is where measuring business outcomes with Objectives and Key Results play a considerable role.

Read More: OKR Examples for Operations that Improve Business Efficiency

But how should you set OKRs for your engineering team? Are there any specific examples? Ideally, your OKRs should move from quarter to quarter and stay aligned with your company’s long-term Objectives. This article explores five OKR examples for engineering teams:

Objective #1: Increase efficiency of QA processes

Key Results:

• Boost automation test coverage from 55% to 85%
• Increase functional test coverage from 65% to 89%
• Lessen the lead time between fixes from 3 weeks to 8 days
• Decrease the number of high priority bugs found in production from 2 to 0

Objective #2: Improve the quality of the product

Key Results:

• Boost code coverage from 45% to 60%
• Reduce the QA rejections per feature, on average, from 2.1 to 1.3
• Increase the crash-free ratio from 86% to 90% for the new release
• Minimize the average number of recent bug reports from 77 per month to 55 per month

Objective #3: Fasten the working speed of the development team

Key Results:

• Boost sprint velocity from 38 to 58 points
• Shorten the cycle time from 8 days to 24 hours
• Decrease the average code review time by 34%
• Reduce the average number of bugs found in a feature from 2.1 to 1.4

Objective #4: Boost the deployment automation process

Key Results:

• Reduce the deployment speed from 40 mins to 15 mins
• Shorten the build timeline by less than five minutes for all projects
• Decrease the time-to-market for each release from 4 weeks to 10 days
• Set up and implement automatic CI and CD with an appropriate enterprise software delivery system

Objective #5: Contribute to the open-source community

Key Results:

• Add 20 pull requests to select public repositories
• Release and achieve 10,000 views on your guide on security testing
• Make the media processing libraries open-source and receive 100+ stars on Github

Read More: 5 Challenges you can Address with OKR Goal-Setting Framework

What to remember while writing the perfect OKR for engineering teams?

As with other OKRs, what’s important to remember with engineering OKRs is that they should be written with specific principles in mind.

Objectives are qualitative goals, and they can turn out to be extremely broad if they do not fall under the SMART framework. That means your Objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. The OKRs for engineering teams must align with the corporate strategy.

Choosing no more than 3-4 objectives enables you to focus on progress in the areas of highest customer value. On the other hand, Key Results tell you how much of the Objective has been achieved. KRs are a measure of the work to be performed, not to be done.

Here is an OKR example: “Creating five web pages” is “work,” but “10% increase in the total page views” is the Key Result. Similarly, “being on track for a successful launch of product X next quarter” is an Objective, but “building a mailing list of 100,000 people” is the Key Result.

You should be able to create both ground and individual OKRs for engineering. The team-level goals could be either top-down (set by management) or bottom-up (set by team members). A good engineering OKR is to strive for a healthy balance of both types.

Over to you

The perfect OKRs will fit seamlessly with the way your engineers already work. Companies that utilize an OKR goal-setting tool such as Unlock:OKR experience an improvement in goal alignment and transparent workflows. Therefore, make sure you rely on a powerful medium that helps you achieve the OKRs for your engineering teams efficiently.

Book a demo and get started today!