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OKR template

Engineering quality and tech debt OKR examples

This is a free engineering quality and tech debt OKR template with 2 objectives, 6 key results, and 8 starter initiatives you can copy. Bugs found before customers find them, and the accumulated debt that taxes every change — paid down where it slows you most. It is written for Seed, Series A and Growth companies.

  • 2 objectives
  • 6 key results
  • Seed
  • Series A
  • Growth

What does a engineering quality and tech debt OKR look like?

Copy these as they are and edit the numbers to your own baselines. The objective is the outcome you want to be true by the end of the quarter; the key results are how you will know it happened; the initiatives are the bets you are making to get there.

Objective 1 Operational

Find our bugs before customers do

A defect a customer reports costs trust as well as time. The annual goal is a product where serious bugs are caught inside the building; this quarter moves the catch point earlier and stops the backlog aging in silence.

KR 1.1 Headline

Bugs reported by customers rather than caught by us 58% → 25% of the bugs logged this quarter

How it is measured: Bugs first reported by a customer, over all bugs logged

Baseline: 58% · Target: 25%

Initiatives

  • Add a smoke test for each of the five flows customers report most
  • Triage every new bug within one business day so nothing ages unlabelled
KR 1.2

Median age of open bugs 64 days → 14 days

How it is measured: Median days since filing, across all open bugs

Baseline: 64 days · Target: 14 days

Initiatives

  • Close or explicitly won't-fix every bug older than two quarters
KR 1.3

Serious defects that escaped to production 7 → 1 per release

How it is measured: Customer-visible defects traced to a release, averaged per release

Baseline: 7 · Target: 1

Initiatives

  • Write a regression test for every escaped defect before its fix merges
Objective 2 Operational

Pay down the debt that taxes every change

Tech debt shows up as cycle time nobody can explain. The annual goal is a codebase where a small change is actually small; this quarter attacks the slowest feedback loops and the modules only one person dares touch.

KR 2.1 Headline

CI wall-clock time on a typical change 42 minutes → 12 minutes

How it is measured: Median minutes from push to a green or red CI verdict

Baseline: 42 minutes · Target: 12 minutes

Initiatives

  • Split the test suite so a change runs only the tests it can affect
  • Cache the two build steps that rebuild the world on every run
KR 2.2

Builds failing for reasons unrelated to the change 19% → 4% of the CI runs this quarter

How it is measured: CI runs that failed on flakiness or infrastructure, over all CI runs

Baseline: 19% · Target: 4%

Initiatives

  • Quarantine every flaky test the day it flakes and fix or delete it within a week
KR 2.3

Modules only one person can safely change 9 → 3

How it is measured: Modules where a single engineer holds all the context, from the team's own census

Baseline: 9 · Target: 3

Initiatives

  • Pair a second engineer onto each single-owner module for one real change

Why are these key results written this way?

Every example above passes the same quality rubric Hespia grades real OKRs against. Four rules do most of the work, and they are worth keeping when you edit the numbers:

  1. The objective has no number in it

    An objective is a qualitative state of the world you want to be true. The number belongs one level down, on the key result. An objective with a metric in the title is really a key result that lost its parent.

  2. Every key result shows a baseline, not just a target

    "Bugs reported by customers rather than caught by us 58% → 25% of the bugs logged this quarter" is readable at a glance because the movement is visible. A target with no starting number cannot be paced weekly, so nobody can tell in week 4 whether it is slipping.

  3. Every ratio names a denominator the team cannot shrink

    "Of the accounts that started the quarter" is a fixed denominator. "Of active accounts" is not — the definition of active can move, and the percentage improves without anything real changing.

  4. Enabling work sits in initiatives, not in key results

    "Launch the new onboarding" is work; "activation in week one from 31% to 45%" is the result the work is meant to produce. Shipping the project is not the same as the outcome arriving, so the two live at different levels.

A template remembers. It doesn't chase.

Copied into a doc, these 6 key results depend on someone reopening the doc every week. Hespia seeds this exact board in one click, then reads pace on every key result weekly, flags what is slipping in week 4 instead of week 13, and writes the digest nobody wants to write. $100/month flat, whole team included.

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Engineering quality and tech debt OKR questions

What are good engineering quality and tech debt OKRs?

Good engineering quality and tech debt OKRs pair a qualitative objective with key results that each carry a number. In this template the objectives are "Find our bugs before customers do" and "Pay down the debt that taxes every change", and every key result underneath states the metric, where it starts, and where it needs to land — for example "Bugs reported by customers rather than caught by us 58% → 25% of the bugs logged this quarter". If a key result has no starting number, it is a task rather than a key result.

How many key results should a engineering quality and tech debt team have?

Three to five key results per objective, and no more than two or three objectives per team in a quarter. This template uses 2 objectives and 6 key results in total, which is a realistic quarter for one team. More than that and the weekly check-in stops fitting in fifteen minutes, which is how the ritual dies.

Are these engineering quality and tech debt OKR examples free to use?

Yes. Every objective, key result, and initiative on this page is free to copy into any doc, spreadsheet, or goal tool, with no signup and no email. Hespia, the AI mentor that tracks weekly pace on each of these key results and chases the owners, is $100/month flat for the whole team.

Why does every key result here name its denominator?

Because a ratio without a stated denominator can be improved by shrinking the bottom number instead of growing the top one. A team that reports "percentage of active accounts" can quietly redefine "active" and post a win it did not earn. Every percentage in this template names a denominator the team cannot move, such as the accounts that started the quarter.

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