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Engineering OKRs

Engineering OKR examples and templates

Better delivery. Built to last.

Engineering OKR templates help teams balance delivery speed with product quality, reliability, and operational health. They are useful when leaders want better visibility into engineering impact, not just output.

Find your template 10 examples, ready to make your own
Clear objectivesMeasurable key resultsBuilt for a weekly check-in

What is a good engineering OKR?

A good engineering OKR pairs one clear objective with two to four measurable key results the team can score every week. It describes an outcome rather than a list of activities, sets targets that are ambitious but scoreable, and is reviewed weekly so blockers surface before the quarter gets away from the team.

START WITH THE OUTCOME

What does your team want to improve?

Pick a starting point. Adjust the targets to your baseline.

10 matching templates

Delivery

Ship faster without breaking things

Increase delivery speed while keeping failures low.

Objective

Increase delivery speed while keeping change failure low

  1. Increase deploys to production from 2 per week to daily
  2. Reduce lead time for changes from 8 days to 2 days
  3. Keep change failure rate under 10%, down from 18%
View template FROM PLAN TO PROGRESS

Make this plan yours.

Copy the template below, then open Tability. In your plan, choose Import goals from CSV or text and paste it into Import from text.

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Reliability

Cut production incidents

Make the product something customers can rely on.

Objective

Make our product something customers can rely on

  1. Reduce customer-facing incidents from 12 to 5 per quarter
  2. Cut mean time to recovery from 3 hours to 45 minutes
  3. Complete post-incident actions for 100% of major incidents within 2 weeks, up from 50%
View template FROM PLAN TO PROGRESS

Make this plan yours.

Copy the template below, then open Tability. In your plan, choose Import goals from CSV or text and paste it into Import from text.

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Reliability

Meet our reliability targets

Hit agreed service levels on the services that matter most.

Objective

Hit agreed SLOs on our most critical services

  1. Raise API availability from 99.5% to 99.9%
  2. Bring p95 response time on core endpoints from 900ms to 400ms
  3. Define and publish SLOs for all 8 tier-1 services, up from 2
View template FROM PLAN TO PROGRESS

Make this plan yours.

Copy the template below, then open Tability. In your plan, choose Import goals from CSV or text and paste it into Import from text.

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Quality

Pay down the tech debt that slows us down

Free up engineering time lost to legacy code.

Objective

Free up engineering time lost to legacy code

  1. Reduce build time from 25 minutes to 8 minutes
  2. Cut time spent on unplanned maintenance from 35% to 20% of sprint capacity
  3. Remove 3 deprecated services and their dependencies
View template FROM PLAN TO PROGRESS

Make this plan yours.

Copy the template below, then open Tability. In your plan, choose Import goals from CSV or text and paste it into Import from text.

Create an account

Platform and cost

Lower cloud costs as we grow

Grow usage without cloud spend growing at the same rate.

Objective

Grow usage without cloud spend growing at the same rate

  1. Reduce infrastructure cost per active customer from $4.20 to $3.00
  2. Tag 95% of cloud resources to an owning team, up from 60%
  3. Cut idle and unused resources from 18% to 5% of spend
View template FROM PLAN TO PROGRESS

Make this plan yours.

Copy the template below, then open Tability. In your plan, choose Import goals from CSV or text and paste it into Import from text.

Create an account

Team

Make developers productive from week one

Shorten the time it takes new engineers to contribute.

Objective

Shorten time to first meaningful contribution for new engineers

  1. Reduce time to first merged pull request from 10 days to 3 days
  2. Get local environment setup under 1 hour, down from 1 day
  3. Raise new-hire onboarding satisfaction from 6.5 to 8.5 out of 10
View template FROM PLAN TO PROGRESS

Make this plan yours.

Copy the template below, then open Tability. In your plan, choose Import goals from CSV or text and paste it into Import from text.

Create an account

Quality

Test what matters

Catch the bugs customers would see before release.

Objective

Catch the bugs customers would see before release

  1. Reduce bugs found in production from 40 to 15 per month
  2. Raise automated test coverage on critical user flows from 45% to 85%
  3. Cut flaky test rate from 8% to 1%
View template FROM PLAN TO PROGRESS

Make this plan yours.

Copy the template below, then open Tability. In your plan, choose Import goals from CSV or text and paste it into Import from text.

Create an account

Platform and cost

Strengthen our security posture

Close the highest-risk gaps before someone else finds them.

Objective

Close the highest-risk security gaps before they're found

  1. Patch 100% of critical vulnerabilities within 7 days, up from 60%
  2. Enforce SSO and MFA on 100% of internal tools, up from 70%
  3. Reduce open high-severity findings from 45 to 10
View template FROM PLAN TO PROGRESS

Make this plan yours.

Copy the template below, then open Tability. In your plan, choose Import goals from CSV or text and paste it into Import from text.

Create an account

Platform and cost

Migrate off a legacy system

Move a critical workload with no customer impact.

Objective

Move a critical workload to the new platform with no customer impact

  1. Migrate 100% of traffic from the legacy system, up from 0%
  2. Keep customer-facing errors during migration under 0.1%
  3. Decommission the legacy system and cut its $15k monthly cost to $0
View template FROM PLAN TO PROGRESS

Make this plan yours.

Copy the template below, then open Tability. In your plan, choose Import goals from CSV or text and paste it into Import from text.

Create an account

Team

Make on-call sustainable

Reduce after-hours pages without missing real issues.

Objective

Reduce after-hours pages without missing real issues

  1. Cut after-hours pages from 30 to 8 per week
  2. Reduce non-actionable alerts from 60% to 15% of all alerts
  3. Raise on-call satisfaction from 4 to 7 out of 10
View template FROM PLAN TO PROGRESS

Make this plan yours.

Copy the template below, then open Tability. In your plan, choose Import goals from CSV or text and paste it into Import from text.

Create an account

Example targets are illustrative. Set yours using your team's actual baseline.

More engineering examples from the library

Explore other approaches to this topic. Check the measures and targets against your own situation.

Engineering

Eliminate high-risk tech debt over the next year

Objective

Reduce high-risk tech debt to improve system stability

  1. Conduct a thorough analysis to measure the impact of eliminating each high-risk tech debt item
  2. Outline and prioritize initiatives to eliminate each high-risk tech debt item
  3. Complete the elimination of at least 50% of high-risk tech debt items
More objectives and key results

Reduce high-risk tech debt to improve system stability

  1. Identify top 10 high-risk tech debt items
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Engineering

Allocate resources to refactor high-priority tech debt

Objective

Reduce technical debt by allocating resources effectively

  1. Implement best practices to avoid future high-priority tech debt accumulation
  2. Achieve a reduction in high-priority tech debt items by 25%
  3. Establish a clear plan for refactoring high-priority tech debt items
More objectives and key results

Reduce technical debt by allocating resources effectively

  1. Prioritize high-priority tech debt items for resource allocation
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Engineering

Enforce coding standards to prevent new tech debt

Objective

Standardize coding practices for debt reduction

  1. Conduct training sessions to educate all team members
  2. Reduce tech debt backlog by 50% through enforcement of standards
  3. Develop and implement updated coding standards
More objectives and key results

Standardize coding practices for debt reduction

  1. Conduct quarterly reviews to ensure adherence to standards
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Engineering

Reduce technical debt

Objective

Reduce significantly the technical debt in our platform

  1. Dedicated 20% of our sprint effort to tackling technical debt
  2. Close 40 issues tagged as technical debt
  3. Boost application performance by 40% as a result of the debt culling
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MAKE IT MEANINGFUL

How to use engineering OKRs

How to use these templates

Define engineering OKRs around delivery flow, product quality, or platform reliability, and make sure progress reviews stay tied to measurable outcomes rather than task completion alone.

01

Set your baseline. Check where you are today, then choose targets that stretch your team.

02

Agree on ownership. Give each key result a clear owner and a source of data.

03

Check in every week. Review the numbers, share confidence, and decide what needs attention.

KNOW WHAT TO MEASURE

The numbers behind your goals.

Choose a small set of KPIs to watch alongside your OKRs.

Explore related KPIs
KEEP EXPLORING

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Engineering OKR questions

What should engineering OKRs measure?

Engineering OKRs work well around delivery and reliability outcomes: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, incident recovery time, and performance budgets. They should measure the health of the system and the flow of work, not individual output.

Should engineering OKRs include feature delivery?

Feature work usually belongs to product OKRs, with engineering as a shared owner. Engineering-specific OKRs are better spent on the outcomes only engineering can own, such as reliability, velocity, security posture, and platform quality.