6 OKR examples for CTO
What are CTO OKRs?
The OKR acronym stands for Objectives and Key Results. It's a goal-setting framework that was introduced at Intel by Andy Grove in the 70s, and it became popular after John Doerr introduced it to Google in the 90s. OKRs helps teams has a shared language to set ambitious goals and track progress towards them.
Formulating strong OKRs can be a complex endeavor, particularly for first-timers. Prioritizing outcomes over projects is crucial when developing your plans.
We've tailored a list of OKRs examples for CTO to help you. You can look at any of the templates below to get some inspiration for your own goals.
If you want to learn more about the framework, you can read more about the OKR meaning online.
Best practices for managing your CTO OKRs
Generally speaking, your objectives should be ambitious yet achievable, and your key results should be measurable and time-bound (using the SMART framework can be helpful). It is also recommended to list strategic initiatives under your key results, as it'll help you avoid the common mistake of listing projects in your KRs.
Here are a couple of best practices extracted from our OKR implementation guide 👇
Tip #1: Limit the number of key results
The #1 role of OKRs is to help you and your team focus on what really matters. Business-as-usual activities will still be happening, but you do not need to track your entire roadmap in the OKRs.
We recommend having 3-4 objectives, and 3-4 key results per objective. A platform like Tability can run audits on your data to help you identify the plans that have too many goals.
Tip #2: Commit to the weekly check-ins
Don't fall into the set-and-forget trap. It is important to adopt a weekly check-in process to get the full value of your OKRs and make your strategy agile – otherwise this is nothing more than a reporting exercise.
Being able to see trends for your key results will also keep yourself honest.
Tip #3: No more than 2 yellow statuses in a row
Yes, this is another tip for goal-tracking instead of goal-setting (but you'll get plenty of OKR examples below). But, once you have your goals defined, it will be your ability to keep the right sense of urgency that will make the difference.
As a rule of thumb, it's best to avoid having more than 2 yellow/at risk statuses in a row.
Make a call on the 3rd update. You should be either back on track, or off track. This sounds harsh but it's the best way to signal risks early enough to fix things.
Building your own CTO OKRs with AI
While we have some examples below, it's likely that you'll have specific scenarios that aren't covered here. There are 2 options available to you.
- Use our free OKRs generator
- Use Tability, a complete platform to set and track OKRs and initiatives
- including a GPT-4 powered goal generator
Best way to track your CTO OKRs
OKRs without regular progress updates are just KPIs. You'll need to update progress on your OKRs every week to get the full benefits from the framework. Reviewing progress periodically has several advantages:
- It brings the goals back to the top of the mind
- It will highlight poorly set OKRs
- It will surface execution risks
- It improves transparency and accountability
Spreadsheets are enough to get started. Then, once you need to scale you can use a proper OKR platform to make things easier.
If you're not yet set on a tool, you can check out the 5 best OKR tracking templates guide to find the best way to monitor progress during the quarter.
CTO OKRs templates
We've covered most of the things that you need to know about setting good OKRs and tracking them effectively. It's now time to give you a series of templates that you can use for inspiration!
You'll find below a list of Objectives and Key Results templates for CTO. We also included strategic projects for each template to make it easier to understand the difference between key results and projects.
Hope you'll find this helpful!
OKRs to reduce technical debt
- Reduce significantly the technical debt in our platform
- Dedicated 20% of our sprint effort to tackling technical debt
- Close 40 issues tagged as technical debt
- Boost application performance by 40% as a result of the debt culling
OKRs to accelerate release cycles
- Increase the velocity of our releases through automation
- Increase production deployments from 1/week to 4/week
- Create deployment pipeline on Github
- Automate deployment scripts
- Reduce build time from 20mins to 5mins
- Review test suites and cut expensive tests
- Enable parallel builds
- Reduce the mean lead time for changes from 8 days to 72h
- Set up dedicate code review time to accelerate PR reviews
- 100% of our services have a Continuous Delivery pipeline
OKRs to improve incident management
- Build an amazing incident management process
- Reduce the number of regressions by 60%
- Increase the size of the incident response team from 2 to 6 people
- Reduce the MTTR from 3h to 60 minutes
OKRs to accelerate development via automation
- Accelerate development through automation
- 100% of repos have a Continuous Delivery pipeline
- Use Github Actions/Bitbucket Pipelines to automate deployments on every commit
- Create automated deployment scripts for all repos
- Increase code coverage from 30% to 60%
- Reduce cycle time from 8 days to 8h
- Reduce build time from 20min to 5min
- Audit tests to find areas of improvements
- Split tests to run in parallel when possible
OKRs to improve developer experience by improvign dev speed
- Provide amazing Developer Experience (DX) by improving dev speed
- 90% of products have a standardized Continuous Delivery pipeline
- Reduce average build time from 20 minutes to 2 minutes
- Reduce release cycle time from 12 days to 3 days
OKRs to improve the Disaster Recover process
- Have a world class DR process
- Increase the number of DR tests from 1 to 3 per quarter
- Reduce recovery period from 24h to 12h
- Reduce recovery point objective from 12 business hours to 4 business hours
More CTO OKR templates
We have more templates to help you draft your team goals and OKRs.
OKRs to develop an LLM chat bot OKRs to enhance fraud detection and prevention in the payment system OKRs to boost the rate of customer repetition OKRs to maximize self-service options for private customers OKRs to develop and launch the MVP for a real estate application OKRs to improve students' comprehension of textbook material
OKRs resources
Here are a list of resources to help you adopt the Objectives and Key Results framework.
- To learn: Complete 2024 OKR cheat sheet
- Blog posts: ODT Blog
- Success metrics: KPIs examples