This is an organizational planning mechanism where there’s a broad objective and metrics to track towards to achieve it.
Examples:
Objective: Improve engineering efficiency across the whole team
- Key Result: Maintain “inbox-zero” for bugs, with a max age of any bug being < 14 days.
- Key Result: Decrease time from PR open -> prod from 2 weeks to 2 days.
- Key Result: Increase deploy frequency from 1 change per day to 1 change per developer per day
- Key Result: Maintain < 10% change fail rate.
Some folks do “milestone”-based KRs, which don’t feel at all like how that’s supposed to be done. The intent is to leave the how to the teams doing the work.