A presentation on the role of goal setting in engineering, including relevant goal examples.

1. The BetterWorks OKR Examples
ENGINEERING

2. 2BetterWorks | hello@betterworks.com
In today’s fast-paced workplace, having an accurate measure of
progress towards your goals is critical for knowing what you’ve done,
how you’re doing and what you have to do next. Measurable OKRs
not only keep teams aligned and individuals accountable, but also
lead to higher performance within the company.
Think of this through the lens of fitness wearables: Fitbit users take
43% more steps than non-Fitbit users. Why? Turns out that just
making goal data and progress available to an individual and their
peers is motivational for doing more.
Different jobs call for vastly different types of goals, so we’ve
created specific OKR examples for major roles within Engineering.
At BetterWorks, we believe setting good OKRs is easy if you start
with the five Goal Science™ pillars: connected, supported, adaptable,
progress-based and aspirational. As you’ll see, the OKR examples we
provide follow these pillars to ensure that your team’s goals are on
the path to success.
To make these examples even more valuable, we’ve divided them
into two categories: objectives and key results. The examples are
not intended to be complete packages of objectives and key results.
Instead, you can choose which cross section of examples is best for
you, or simply use our examples as a guide as you begin setting OKRs.
Chairman of Kleiner Perkins (and BetterWorks board member), John
Doerr, believes that there are three words that make or break goals:
“as measured by”. So a simple rubric for good OKRs is as follows:
I will ________ as measured by ____________.

3. 3BetterWorks | hello@betterworks.com
Ensure that release is delivered
on-time with high quality
• Have engineering team contribute 200 story points by end
of March/Sprint
• Complete data migration by end of March/Sprint
• Have engineering team contribute 750 code review points
by end of March/Sprint
• Add 100 automated front-end tests by end of March/Sprint
Assemble and motivate a stellar
engineering team
• Interview 50 engineering candidates by the end of Q1
• Hire 5 new engineers by the end of Q1
• Implement streamlined product proposal process for
developers by March 10th
• Plan Q2 hackathon by end March 15th
VP of Engineering
ROLE
GOAL AS MEASURED BY
Expand our platform strategy • Deliver SalesForce connector by end of March
• Plan and finalize specs for REST-based APIs to perform
data-based operations on our model by end of March
• Complete architecture diagrams and platform white paper
by end of March
• Prototype our NG product in Clojure to compare performance
and maintainability against our existing FORTRAN-based product
by end of March
Chief Architect
ROLE
GOAL AS MEASURED BY

4. 4BetterWorks | hello@betterworks.com
Implement refactored email
delivery architecture
• Meet with QA and Chief Architect to create refactoring plan
February 3
• Simplify and clean up the email signals and processing by
February 16th
• Ship email delivery architecture by code freeze
• Ship email delivery architecture with complete
documentation and unit tests by code freeze
Software Engineer
ROLE
GOAL AS MEASURED BY
Keep your mind and body sharp
so your work is awesome
• Go to 5 developer meetups by the end of the quarter
• Make an open source project that gets more than 150
stars by the end of Q1
• Develop elementary proficiency at Swift and Objective C
by the end of Q1
• Do 2,000 pushups by the end of Q1
Ensure that our product
scales out
• Re-architect our product to handle average load of 200 requests per
second with 90% responses returning within 100 ms by end of Q1
• Maintain current Amazon Web Services costs at 5% of company
revenues at end of Q1
• Introduce message queue to scale up our event processing
framework by end of Q1
• Replace Oracle database with NoSQL solution by end of Q1
GOAL AS MEASURED BY

5. 5BetterWorks | hello@betterworks.com
Drive quality for features
shipping from February release
• Find 50 bugs by the end February
• End February with 250 open bugs of P2 or higher
• Increase Karma test coverage from 86% to 90% by
end February
• Maintain zero regressions in March
Onboard, establish a strong
foundation, and ramp up
quickly during first quarter
• Watch all Egghead D3 videos and create own feature widget by end
of Q1
• Watch 25 Egghead videos for Angular by the end of Q1
• Make a browser game using node.js and socket.io by end of Q1
• Finish 3 courses in Codeschool
Quality Assurance Engineer
ROLE
GOAL AS MEASURED BY
Deliver revised dashboards
and analyses for internal
data platform
Shed light on never-before-
seen insights that will improve
the company bottom line
• Implement new cohort analysis dashboard by end of January
• Improve the Sales and Marketing dashboard by end of January
• Build upsell prediction model and dashboard by end of February
• Design multivariate testing to capture impact of new features on
user acquisition dashboard by end of March
• Identify three web pages that leave users at a dead-end (i.e.
users are not sure what to do next)
• Summarize top 5 key insights from our usage data that will
increase user engagement
• Understand how product usage varies by size of company
and market sector
• Discover the ten most frustrating searches that users are
performing (i.e. user keeps re-trying with a slightly different
query; or results mismatch query)
Data Scientist
ROLE
GOAL AS MEASURED BY

6. 6BetterWorks | hello@betterworks.com
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999 Main Street, Redwood City CA 94063 | 844.438.2388 | hello@betterworks.com
Goal Science®
Thinking
About BetterWorks
The BetterWorks platform is designed for today’s workforce by applying
five Goal Science pillars, based on proven goal setting practices and
organizational research.
BetterWorks provides enterprise software to easily manage collaborative
goals and lightweight performance conversations. Its platform is built on
Goal Science insights and operational research to help high-performing
companies align and engage their teams, execute more effectively and
ultimately become more successful.
For more information, visit www.betterworks.com.
Connected Supported Progress-based Adaptable Aspirational