- Engineering in tech companies plays a critical function. Engineering is responsible for developing the core product which forms the crux of the business – what they are making and selling and what their customers are buying and using. The VP of Engineering, along with the CTO, typically sets up the Engineering team and is responsible for developing the Technology roadmap, assessing the time required to provide new features/products and delivering quality releases on schedule.
- The Engineering department may include several functions – Data, Infrastructure, Reliability & Security, Developer Productivity, Enterprise Productivity, Project Management, Design, UX, Development, Integration, QA, Devops etc and ensures the realization of product vision through execution.
- Here, we have showcased OKR examples for various domains within the Engineering department such as, Systems Integrations OKRs, Backend process OKRs, Mobile Applications OKRs, User Interface OKRs, Quality Assurance (QA) OKRs & Product management OKRs.
#1: Reliability & Security OKRs
To build an efficient product, the first thing to focus on is improving the stability of the product, with supportive key results that ensures APIs response time, decreases production exceptions, and decreases the TrackJS errors.
Objective
Improve Product Stability
Target Date: Q3-2020
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Ensure APIs response time within 400 ms
APIs response timeDecrease production exceptions from 2000 to 200
Production ExceptionsDecrease TrackJS errors to 0
TrackJS Errors#2: Data Security OKRs
Improve data security and recovery rate for the application by safeguarding against any security breaches, reducing the time taken to data migration/ backup, and increasing the data recovery rate.
Objective
Increase data security and recovery rate in the application
Target Date: Q3-2020
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Decrease the data breach incidents from 3 to 0 in the application
Data breachIncrease data recovery rate from 95% to 100%
Data recovery rate Decrease the time taken for backup from 4 hours to 1 hour
Data back uptime#3: Usability OKRs
User experience defines users’ impressions of your website or other application based on how easy and pleasant it is to use. Create usability OKRs to Improve user experience by reducing friction between your website and your target audience
Objective
Improve User Experience
Target Date: Q3-2020
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Decrease New user signup time from 10 minutes to 2 minutes
New user signup timeIncrease System Usability Scale from 80 to 90
System Usability ScaleIncrease the Net Promoter Score from 6 to 9
Net Promoter Score#4: Engineering OKRs
Localization footprint is an important aspect that needs to be addressed in order to grow the audience of the software geographically. Building such a great OKR with substantial key results that increase the support of new languages, KRs that ensure to maintain proper localization of features with updated documents required for it.
Objective
Improve Localization Footprint
Target Date: Q3-2020
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Increase support of new languages from 5 to 10 this quarter
Languages SupportedEnsure 100% of new features released are supported with localization infrastructure
Localization InfrastructureReduce the publishing time of updated localization documents post each release from 8 hours to 4 hours
Localization Documents#5: Application Development OKRs
Improve Software Development Process to be able to develop adaptive solutions & avoid constant crisis. An objective to improve the quality in the development process can be tracked by setting KRs for increasing the unit test coverage and story point delivery, decreasing the time taken from delivering an idea to release. So try building such key results and stay on track.
Objective
Improve the quality of sprint release
Target Date: Q3-2020
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Increase Code Coverage from 85% to 95%
Code CoverageIncrease Automation Test Coverage for unit testing from 60% to 80%
Story point deliveryReduce Cyclomatic Complexity for every code branch from 15 to 6
Cyclomatic Complexity#6: Engineering OKRs
Improving the stability of product releases will be considered as one of the vital objectives of certain firms, so objectives like this must essentially be supported with key results that decreases unscheduled downtime, decreasing time taken between each release and decreasing the deployment time for addressing production bugs can fasten the process.
Objective
Improve the stability of product releases
Target Date: Q3-2020
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Decrease Unscheduled downtime from 3 hours to 1 hour
Unscheduled downtimeDecrease Time between each release from 30 days to 15 days
Time between each releaseDecrease number of emergency patches from 6 to 2 per quarter
Number of emergency patches#7: Mobile OKRs
Getting more app downloads is a technique and an accomplishment within itself. Engage OKRs to track the right mobile marketing strategy that will boost your mobile app installs. Frame OKRs like launching 3 voice assistant integrations, increasing Android & IOS installs and increasing test coverage on mobile friendly user interfaces that can really help to increase the downloads.
Objective
Launch new integrations to increase installs
Target Date: Q3-2020
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Launch 3 voice assistant integrations (Siri, Google assistant, Cortana)
voice assistant integrationsIncrease Android & IOS installs from 500K to 2000K
Android & IOS installsIncrease the play store ratings from 3.9 to 4.5
Play store rating#8: QA OKRs
Quality Assurance (QA) is a systematic process that ensures product and service excellence. The agile QA process begins at the inception of the software development life cycle itself. Track QA through OKRs to have a control on QA process and improve its efficiency.
Objective
Improve QA process to reduce defect leakage
Target Date: Q3-2020
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Increase functional test coverage from 85% to 99%
Functional test coverageDecrease number of High priority Bugs in production from 2 to 0 KPI
Number of High priority BugsIncrease Automation test coverage from 80% to 90%
Automation test coverage#9: QA OKRs
Enhancing the quality control process ensures you can control the defects that might be possible to be introduced per release; Use OKRs to focus on decreasing defect rejection percentage and decrease mean time to detect the defects thereby increasing the Quality of the product in an efficient manner and reducing cost be early detection of defects.
Objective
Improve Quality control process
Target Date: Q3-2020
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Ensure not more than At most 2 defects per release in production
Number of defects identified in productionDecrease Defect rejection percentage from 15% to 5%
Defect rejection percentage Decrease Mean Time to Detection of defects from 6 to 2 hrs
Mean Time to Detection#10: Usability OKRs
Usability is an attribute that describes the ability of an organization to grow and manage increased demand. Improving Usability has an advantage because it is more adaptable to the changing needs or demands of its users or clients. Framing such key results will let you yield trackable results in your engineering team.
Objective
Improve Product Usability
Target Date: Q3-2020
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Increase the usability score from 75 to 85
Usability scoreIncrease new features usage from 60% to 90%
New features usageIncrease User satisfaction score from from 70% to 80%
User satisfaction scoreConclusion
Profit.co’s OKR software provides an intuitive interface to define your Engineering OKRs and also comes with 300+ predefined KPIs to make OKR adoption easy. By the time you finish going through the examples, you should now be well-equipped to create both group and individual OKRs for engineering. To leverage the many advantages that it can bring to the engineering process, it is important to treat OKR as a journey and not a destination unto itself.
Also check out our other OKR example pages, HR OKRs, Marketing OKRs, and Sales OKRs.