Engineering OKRs: Top Strategies to Drive Team Alignment

If you’ve worked in an enterprise environment, you’re likely familiar with “objectives” that you’ve had to meet to achieve certain goals. But, to meet such objectives, you have to complete tasks tied around that objective.

Well, this is where Objective and Key Results (OKRs) come into play.

An OKR is an effective tool used by companies to highlight their goals and the milestones (deliverables) needed to accomplish them. Simply put, it lets you define what you want to achieve and what actions you need to take to achieve it.

This is an important tool for development teams as software development revolves around effective feature delivery. So, let’s take a look at how engineering OKRs can be used to help achieve seamless software development.

An engineering OKR is specific to an engineering team. It focuses on technical goals, such as:

1. Improving system reliability
2. Improving system scalability
3. Improving system performance
4. Delivering key features.

These OKRs align with broader company goals but revolve around the technical execution required to achieve those outcomes.

Engineering OKRs vs. General OKRs

Now that you have a high-level understanding of engineering OKRs, let’s take a look at how they differ from general OKRs.

Focus on technical goals

An engineering OKR measures technical improvements, such as performance, security, and reliability, while a general OKR focuses on the overall business goals, such as revenue growth and satisfaction.

Alignment with development cycles

Engineering OKRs align with Agile sprints, product roadmaps, or technical debt reduction, focusing on short-term execution and long-term scalability.

Cross-team dependencies

Engineering OKRs require collaboration with product, design, or QA teams, making them more dependent on cross-functional planning. A general OKR, on the other hand, is centered around the leadership team of a company.

Taking everything into consideration, you might wonder – What does an engineering OKR look like?

Well, here are some common examples of engineering OKRs.

Example 1

• Objective: Enhance system reliability.

Key Results:

• Achieve 99.9% uptime across all services in Q1.
• Reduce incident response time by 20%.
• Decrease average API latency by 15%.

Example 2

• Objective: Optimize code quality and maintainability.

Key Results:

• Increase code coverage to 90% on all critical modules.
• Reduce technical debt backlog by 30%.
• Complete 10 peer reviews per developer per sprint.

Example 3

• Objective: Accelerate development velocity.

Key Results:

• Deploy at least two features per sprint.
• Reduce average feature lead time from 10 days to 7.
• Conduct bi-weekly retrospectives to improve team productivity by 10%.

Example 4

• Objective: Improve security.

Key Results:

• Fix 100% of high-priority vulnerabilities within 7 days of detection.
• Conduct quarterly penetration tests and resolve 95% of identified issues.
• Implement two-factor authentication for all internal tools.

Now that we’ve seen what engineering OKRs look like, let’s take a look at why a team would need one in the first place.

Engineering teams operate in complex environments with tight deadlines, technical challenges, and cross-functional dependencies.

For example, an e-commerce company might frequently experience website downtimes during peak shopping hours. This could be due to engineering teams lacking a clear focus on activities like feature optimizations. Thus, they are driving an application without a clear focus.

This can be resolved by defining an engineering OKR. A simple engineering OKR for this problem could be:

Objective

• Ensure website reliability during high-traffic periods.

Key Results

• Increase website uptime to 99.95% during Q4 (holiday season).
• Implement auto-scaling infrastructure to handle a 50% increase in traffic load.
• Resolve 90% of critical infrastructure issues within 1 hour of detection.

Here is how OKRs support engineering teams:

• Alignment with business goals: OKRs ensure that engineering initiatives directly contribute to organizational success.
• Prioritization and focus: They help engineers prioritize work, ensuring the most critical and impactful tasks are addressed first.
• Clear accountability: OKRs clarify responsibilities and reduce overlap, enabling teams to work efficiently.
• Measurement of success: Engineering OKRs define specific, measurable outcomes, making it easier to track progress and improve performance.
• Improved collaboration: OKRs foster alignment with other teams, such as product and design, ensuring smooth execution of cross-functional initiatives.

So, now that we understand the importance of engineering OKRs, let’s take a look at how you can create effective OKRs for your engineering team.

In fact, you can do so in 10 simple steps.

Step 1: Understand business goals

Engineering teams should align their efforts with the company’s strategic objectives.

For example, if the business aims to improve customer retention, engineering teams can focus on enhancing system reliability or optimizing user-facing features.

So, understanding these goals helps ensure that the development directly supports organizational success.

Step 2: Collaborate with stakeholders

Work closely with cross-functional stakeholders, such as product managers, designers, and leadership, to identify critical priorities. This collaboration ensures engineering OKRs reflect both business needs and technical challenges.

It’s important to understand that stakeholder input can help avoid misalignment and sets realistic expectations for deliverables.

Step 3: Define clear and aspirational objectives

An objective should be a high-level, qualitative statement that provides direction and inspiration.

For example:

Objective: Improve system reliability to enhance user trust.

These objectives should strike a balance between being ambitious and achievable while inspiring teams to push their boundaries without setting unrealistic outcomes. So, make sure that the objectives that you define are “SMART” –

1. Specific
2. Measurable
3. Achievable
4. Realistic
5. Time-bound

Step 4: Set measurable key results

Key results break down objectives into quantifiable, time-bound targets.

Each key result should indicate success in achieving the objective. For example:

Key results for improving system reliability could include:

1. Achieve 99.95% system uptime in the first quarter (Q1).
2. Resolve 95% of high-priority incidents within 1 hour.
3. Implement auto-scaling to handle 50% more traffic.
4. Make sure key results are specific and measurable to track progress effectively.

Step 5: Ensure feasibility and resource alignment

OKRs should be realistic. So, before you define an OKR, make sure to assess the team’s resources, skills, and workload.

If you define OKRs with no background research, you might lead your team to burnout, missed deadlines, and reduced morale.

Step 6: Involve the engineering team

When defining OKRs, make sure that you involve your team. By doing so, you can immediately assign the OKR to a specific developer and refine the OKR with them. This ensures team members take ownership of the objective and stay committed to delivering results.

Step 7: Focus on impact, not tasks

OKRs should emphasize outcomes rather than outputs.

For example, instead of setting a key result like “Write 100 automated tests,” focus on the impact: “Reduce production bugs by 30%.”

Step 8: Review and iterate regularly

OKRs are typically set quarterly, but engineering teams should review progress regularly.

Use retrospectives or bi-weekly reviews to assess progress and address blockers. If business priorities change, adjust OKRs to remain relevant and achievable.

Step 9: Promote transparency and alignment

Share engineering OKRs with other departments to ensure better alignment and collaboration.

Transparency ensures that everyone understands the engineering team’s priorities and avoids duplicated efforts or conflicting goals.

Step 10: Celebrate success and learn from challenges

At the end of the OKR cycle, evaluate performance. Ensure that missed targets are analyzed to identify areas for improvement.

We’ve looked at how you can implement an OKR. But it’s also important to understand there are certain things that you should not do while implementing OKRs. Some of these can include:

1. Setting vague objectives: Make sure that your objectives aren’t vague. Instead, make sure that they are well-defined and “SMART” in nature.
2. Overloading teams with too many OKRs: Do not overload your team with OKRs. It could overwhelm the team and impact productivity.
3. Focusing on outputs instead of outcomes: Ensure you define your key results as outcomes and not outputs like “build 5 features”.
4. Setting unrealistic goals: If you define an unrealistic goal, you might demotivate your team by setting them out to fail. Hence, make sure that the OKR is achievable.

Luckily, there are tools that can help you define and track OKRs. You can leverage tools like:

1. Jira Align

By using the OKR board for Jira, you can define your OKRs effectively and track them with real-time visibility.

2. Weekdone

Weekdone helps teams stay aligned with weekly check-ins, progress reporting, and a user-friendly platform for tracking OKRs.

3. Perdoo

Perdoo combines OKRs and KPIs, offering strategy maps and integrations to seamlessly align goals and track performance.

To sum things up, engineering OKRs helps improve the overall quality of software while ensuring that it aligns with the business goals. This ensures that the software is delivered while considering business value.

Ensure that your objectives are well-defined and that your key results are measurable outcomes rather than outputs.

Thank you for reading.