Engineering OKRs: real examples, explained

Very nice to see an engineering team being able to craft very clear, outcome-focused OKRs. It's clearly targeting the scope and focus of the engineering team when they say they need to deliver towards the product roadmap, so there's a clear team mission built in here.

I see some key results that might become burdensome to measure if there's no automation or some kind of process for capturing the numbers. There's always the risk that you can solve these key results without using common sense (for example, doing much smaller deploys instead of large ones), or solve for one of them without getting actual business benefit. I think it's clear with common sense what the team wants to achieve, and that's what's important. What this OKR communicates is: this is our common focus right now.

This is a strong OKR overall, well crafted. We could wish for the objective to have a little more inspiration, or to more clearly give a why: why this is important, connected to strategy or business goals. It is often hard for engineering teams to identify real core outcomes and key results, but all of these are examples of just that.

What you see with engineering OKRs is that key results are often very hard to make understandable for the rest of the organisation. That makes it even more important to have an objective that clearly connects to business outcomes, or to how this actually helps the team, and is not framed as an internal matter like in this example. Overall, very strong.

This looks like a team with a lot of incidents, and maybe this is their only OKR for the quarter, to really get this part of the work in order. From that perspective it is a good reminder that OKRs are just for the changes you want to achieve. Of course they will do lots of engineering work that is not about incident management, but the core change they need this quarter is how they manage incidents. It is a strong OKR.

The main gap is that the objective could be a little more inspiring, or connect stronger to strategy, to the business, or to the customer. "Turn incidents from firefights into routine" is just the what. An alternative could be something like: enhance our customers' experience of the software through best-in-class incident management. More inspiring, and it makes clear why this matters.