Engineering (R&D) OKR examples

When you're building a product-focused team and want your team to have a product mindset and empathize with your customers, engineering OKRs is a great way to achieve this goal.

In this article, you'll find the relevant Engineering OKR examples.

Engineering teams context

When talking about the engineering team, we assume it's a team that works on delivering the product and implementing the company vision.

Here are a few main categories that engineering teams might focus on:

1. Product.
   
2. Performance.
   
3. Education.
   
4. CSR/contributing to the community.
   

1 — Product

How can the engineering team contribute towards the product vision? How can we encourage developers to "wear the shoes" of the end-users? These are some of the questions that good engineering team OKRs can help you answer with.

Objective 1: Improve the quality of our product‍

Key Results:

1. Reduce the number of reported bugs from 2.1 to 1.0 (per account per month)
   
2. Increase the crash-free ratio from 96% to 99% for the new release
   
3. Reduce bugs-per-feature metric from 1.7 to 1.0
   
4. Increase the code coverage with test from 35% to 50%
   

2 — Performance

How can the engineering team improve its performance and delivery? How can we increase our output with the same people and resources?

Objective 2: Accelerate the development team speed‍

Key Results:

1. Increase the Sprint team velocity from 42 to 60
   
2. Reduce the avg number of bugs per feature from 1.7 to 1
   
3. Reduce average lead time by 30%
   
4. Set up the dual-track mode (for dev and design team to run in parallel

Objective 3: Increase the automation of the deployment‍

Key Results:

1. Set up automatic CI and CD with Travis
   
2. Set up Sentry on the new product
   
3. Run 30% of the test automatically on Travis
   
4. Set up the dual-track mode (for dev and design team to run in parallel)

Objective 4: Improve the quality of the development process‍

Key Results:

1. Set up static code checkers
   
2. Achieve 100% code-review for all Pull Requests
   
3. Research and implement single code-style for all the engineering teams
   
4. Set up automatic CI and CD with Jenkins

Objective 5: Refactor old reporting CRM module‍

Key Results:

1. Create the refactoring plan
   
2. Rewrite the module from AngularJS to React
   
3. Rewrite the API for the reporting routes
   
4. Reduce the response time for old APIs from 890 ms to 300 ms (on average)
   

3 — Education

How can we accelerate the engineering team learning and development? How can we implement the regular learning program and encourage the team members to participate in it proactively?

Objective 6: Continuously improve and grow as a team‍

Key Results:

1. Create a competency matrix for 3 engineering roles
   
2. Create A player profile for 4 positions
   
3. Write 3 articles sharing our recent performance testing and insights
   
4. Speak on the local JS meetu

Objective 7: Boost team members career development‍

Key Results:

1. Increase the promotion rate by 20% this year
   
2. Create a career roadmap for 5 most popular positions
   
3. Increase the 1-on-1s satisfaction for the "career development" question from 7.3 to 9.0

Objective 8: Launch internal Education Camp‍

Key Results:

1. Conduct 6 interview with tech leads to figure out the most critical educational needs
   
2. Create a roadmap for the educational events/activities
   
3. Conduct the first EduCamp for Engineering team on the Security topic
   
4. Achieve 9.0 satisfaction and effectiveness score of the first module

4 — CSR/contributing to the community

How might we encourage team members to share their experiences and contribute to the community? It's an integral part of the Corporate Social Responsibility program. It's also a great way to give back and help the people around. Also, it's a powerful way to boost the employer brand of the organization.

Objective 9: Become a socially responsible organization‍

Key Results:

1. Release 4 educational engineering articles on the blog
   
2. 5 of our team members volunteer in the local tree-planting event
   
3. Hire 2 juniors for the summer internship

Objective 10: Contribute to the open-source community‍

Key Results:

1. Open-source our Image processing library and receive 100 stars on Github
   
2. Merge 10 pull-requests to the public repositories
   
3. Release and achieve 5,000 views on our Guide on Security Testing
   

Summary

The engineering team is an important part of any tech organization. The right engineering OKRs would help you align your team, contribute to your product, increase performance, boost education and career development, and also help implement your CSR program.

Here are more OKR examples for Product, Marketing, Sales, Human Resources/People Ops teams.

Need a simple and free tool for your team to track OKRs? Check a free OKR tool Plai.
Plai has 80+ templates of OKRs with metrics and you can add them to your cycle with just one click.