OKRs for Engineering Teams: Setting Goals That Drive Technical Excellence

Last verified: February 2026

Overview

Engineering teams often struggle with OKRs because their work feels inherently output-driven: ship features, fix bugs, reduce debt. The key is reframing engineering goals around outcomes — reliability, velocity, user impact — rather than tasks completed.

Why Engineering Teams Need OKRs

Without OKRs, engineering priorities default to:

• Whatever the loudest stakeholder requests
• An ever-growing backlog with no strategic filter
• Technical debt that never gets prioritized
• Reactive firefighting instead of proactive improvement

OKRs give engineering leaders a tool to negotiate priorities, protect strategic investments, and demonstrate impact beyond "features shipped."

Engineering OKR Examples

Platform Reliability

Objective: Deliver a platform our customers can depend on

• KR1: Achieve 99.95% uptime (up from 99.8%)
• KR2: Reduce P1 incident count from 8/quarter to 2/quarter
• KR3: Mean time to recovery under 15 minutes for all P1 incidents

Developer Velocity

Objective: Enable the team to ship faster with confidence

• KR1: Reduce average PR review time from 48 hours to 8 hours
• KR2: Increase deployment frequency from weekly to daily
• KR3: Achieve 85% test coverage on critical paths (up from 60%)

User-Facing Impact

Objective: Make the product noticeably faster for end users

• KR1: Reduce p95 page load time from 3.2s to under 1.5s
• KR2: Reduce API response time from 400ms to under 150ms
• KR3: Zero user-reported performance complaints (currently ~5/week)

Technical Debt

Objective: Modernize the codebase to support the next 2 years of growth

• KR1: Migrate 100% of services from legacy framework to current stack
• KR2: Reduce build time from 12 minutes to under 3 minutes
• KR3: Eliminate all critical security vulnerabilities (currently 7)

Team Growth

Objective: Build an engineering culture that attracts top talent

• KR1: Publish 4 engineering blog posts (at least 2 by ICs)
• KR2: 100% of engineers participate in one learning activity (conference, course, book club)
• KR3: Reduce time-to-fill for engineering roles from 65 days to 35 days

Engineering-Specific OKR Tips

1. Measure outcomes, not outputs — "Deploy 15 features" is a task list. "Reduce churn from reliability issues by 30%" is an OKR.
2. Balance build vs. maintain — Dedicate at least one OKR to reliability, performance, or tech debt each quarter.
3. Use engineering metrics — DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR) make excellent Key Results.
4. Connect to business impact — "Reduce page load time" becomes more compelling as "Reduce page load time to improve conversion rate."
5. Protect maker time — OKR check-ins should be lightweight. Don't add process burden to an already process-heavy function.

The DORA Metrics as OKR Key Results

The four DORA metrics align naturally with engineering OKRs:

How Krezzo Helps

Krezzo helps engineering teams set outcome-oriented OKRs, track progress against DORA and custom engineering metrics, and align technical goals with broader company objectives — without adding bureaucratic overhead to the development workflow.

Sources

• Forsgren, Nicole et al. Accelerate. IT Revolution Press, 2018.
• Doerr, John. Measure What Matters. Penguin, 2018.
• krezzo.com