OKR Examples for Engineering Team
Sample objectives and key results for engineering roles, from the CTO to the security engineer, plus a free downloadable PDF.
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What Is an OKR for Engineering Team?
OKRs help any individual or team stay on track and aligned with the organization's broader goals, your engineering team included. The engineering team is the group responsible for designing new products through code. Their core job is to hit the targets the organization sets for its products, while keeping real customer needs in view. When a customer raises an issue, it's the engineering team's job to resolve it as quickly as possible.
Beyond keeping the team focused and aligned with company goals, OKRs also help engineers stay productive and contribute to stronger customer retention. The examples below are meant to guide you in designing OKRs for your own engineering team, so nothing important slips through.
Engineering Team OKR Examples
OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. Companies such as Google and Intel use it to set goals. KRAs and KPIs usually track long-term performance, while OKRs suit shorter goals that are specific, achievable, and easy to measure.
The method works for any team, and engineering is a natural fit, since it started at Intel, an engineering-led company. The examples below are written for engineering roles, and you can swap in your own numbers.
Chief Technical Officer
Objective 1: Add AI to our existing product architecture
- Hold a planning meeting with every relevant lead within 2 days of a new initiative being proposed
- Name an owner for each workstream and get 4 engineers committed to the work
- Complete 3 to 4 full test rounds before anything reaches customers
Vice President of Engineering
Objective 2: Improve product quality
- Cut the number of open bugs by 50% by the end of the quarter
- Reduce software crashes by 30%
Software Engineer
Objective 3: Make the product faster and more stable
- Bring the bugs assigned to me down by 20%
- Cut the product's loading time by 10%
- Halve the production incidents caused by the services I own
Objective 4: Answer more customer queries
- Respond to 5% more customer queries than last quarter
- Raise the share of queries fully solved to 40%
Quality Assurance
Objective 5: Finish 3 test rounds across 5 different product requirements
- Pair testers in groups of 2 on every task
- Increase test coverage by 50%
- Make sure every team keeps its test case records up to date
Product Manager
Objective 6: Ship the release without critical errors
- Release on or before the planned date
- Keep uptime at 99.5% or higher in the first month after launch
Network Engineer
Objective 7: Keep every office device running well
- Run 25% more stability checks on devices than last quarter
- Cut slow-device complaints by 50%
Objective 8: Keep the whole office connected
- Test login authentication on every computer each month
- Confirm DHCP is handing out addresses correctly on every ethernet and wifi network
Cyber Security Engineer
Objective 9: Make company data safer
- Back up essential data to the cloud every day and verify 100% of the backups
- Scan every company device for viruses and malware once a week
- Keep data loss incidents at zero
OKRs are short-term by design, so progress shows up quickly. Keep the targets ambitious but reachable. A goal that pushes people past what's realistic stops motivating anyone.
Quick Tips
- Sample OKRs for your engineering team to help motivate them toward their targets.
- How to set custom goals for individual team members that point in one direction, rather than spreading focus across too many things at once.
- How to frame objectives that encourage your employees and teams while keeping everyone on track.
- How to set key results that are genuinely measurable and achievable.
- How these can be designed as short-term or long-term, depending on what you need.
- What to do if an employee doesn't hit a target within the time you've set.
- How a single objective can have multiple key results that all help get you there.
- How OKRs can work top-down or bottom-up, depending on your structure.