Engineering OKRs go wrong in one of two ways. Either they are activity goals dressed up as outcomes ("complete the platform migration"), or they are business goals that engineering has no direct lever to move ("grow revenue 30%"). Both produce quarters where the team hits its goals and nothing important changes.
Good engineering OKRs sit between those two failure modes. They are outcomes engineering can move, that connect clearly to business results.
The structure that works
Each engineering OKR should answer three questions. What user or business outcome does this improve? What metric will move if we succeed? What level of that metric counts as success?
If you cannot answer the first question, the OKR is internal-facing and should be a project, not an OKR. If you cannot answer the second, the OKR is qualitative and uneditable. If you cannot answer the third, you will know at quarter end that you "made progress" but not whether you won.
Examples that hold up
Reliability OKR.
Objective: Make our platform reliable enough that customers stop citing reliability as a churn reason.
KRs: Reduce P1/P2 incidents from 8/quarter to under 3/quarter. Mean time to detect under 5 minutes for 90% of incidents. Customer-reported availability above 99.9% in three of three months.
Why it works: each KR is measurable, the connection to churn risk is direct, and engineering owns every lever.
Velocity OKR.
Objective: Cut cycle time so we can ship in days, not weeks.
KRs: Median PR cycle time from open to merge under 24 hours. P90 deploy time under 15 minutes. Lead time from idea to production under 14 days for 80% of features.
Why it works: ships of paper-pushing produce numbers that are hard to fake.
Cost OKR.
Objective: Bring infrastructure cost growth below revenue growth.
KRs: Infra cost per customer down 20% by end of quarter. Compute waste (idle instances, oversized resources) below 10% of bill. Three highest-cost services profiled and optimized.
Why it works: connects to a real business metric (gross margin), and engineering owns the technical work.
Enterprise readiness OKR.
Objective: Remove the technical blockers to deals above $50K ACV.
KRs: SSO available to all enterprise customers. Audit logs exported in customer-defined format. Quarterly customer-led pen test passed with zero highs.
Why it works: directly tied to revenue, with specific testable outcomes.
Examples that do not work
"Migrate to Kubernetes." This is a project. The OKR would be the outcome the migration enables: faster deploys, lower cost, better isolation. State that as the goal and let the team choose whether Kubernetes is actually the right path.
"Improve code quality." Unmeasurable. Pick a proxy that matters: test coverage on critical paths, defect escape rate, time-to-fix for production bugs.
"Hire 5 senior engineers." Activity. The outcome is presumably increased capacity for some initiative. State the outcome.
"Increase MRR by $200K." Engineering does not own this metric directly. They contribute through specific work. State the work outcome.
How to actually run them
Three to five OKRs per quarter, no more. Each one with three to five KRs. Reviewed weekly in a 30-minute meeting. Scored quarterly with honest grades (0.7 is a good score; 1.0 means the goals were not ambitious enough).
The OKRs are not the work plan. They are the lens for prioritizing the work plan. When the team is debating whether to do project A or project B, the OKRs tell them which one matters.
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