High-performing engineering teams excel at effective goal-setting. They understand their objectives and are equipped with the resources, tools, and support needed to achieve them. This alignment ensures that everyday tasks contribute to broader business priorities and drives productivity and engagement. (source)
Engineering goals should cascade from company-wide objectives down to teams and individual contributors. This ensures alignment with business priorities and fosters a sense of common purpose. Employees who link their goals to organizational objectives are 3.5 times more likely to be engaged. (source)
Common engineering KPIs include application speed and load times, number of releases, story points completed, code coverage, number of comments per pull request, test case coverage, velocity, burndown rate, workload balance, running costs, number of bugs, average downtime, PR review rate and merge time, developer turnover rate, and code quality SLA. (source)
Popular frameworks include Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and SMART goals. OKRs connect objectives to measurable key results, while SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. Spinach AI offers guides and over 240 OKR goal examples. (source)
Managers should involve their teams by capturing feedback during goal brainstorming sessions, using idea management tools, and regularly discussing goals in one-on-one meetings. This collaborative approach increases investment and ownership among team members. (source)
Examples include completing projects as lead engineer, mentoring interns, improving technical communication, participating in design reviews, reducing query load times, and expanding professional networks. Spinach AI provides a library of over 180 engineering goal examples. (source)
Managers should regularly discuss goals in one-on-one meetings, use version-controlled documents to track accomplishments and areas for improvement, and provide coaching and feedback throughout the year. (source)
Examples include fixing medium-level bugs, increasing code coverage, refactoring code, creating documentation, building and releasing features on time, reducing PR turnaround time, and completing web development training. (source)
Managers can implement one-on-one programs, choose meeting platforms like Spinach AI, introduce themes for improvement, and ensure regular, meaningful conversations. Frequent communication is especially important for remote teams. (source)
DevOps goals include implementing trending systems for infrastructure monitoring, ensuring 100% of critical systems are backed up nightly, resolving failed backup alerts, and attaining full coverage by the end of the quarter. (source)
Managers should discuss personal and career aspirations with their reports, using one-on-one meetings to understand motivations and challenges. Questions can include future role evolution, learning opportunities, and big goals for the quarter. (source)
Backend engineer goals include introducing integration testing, implementing API monitoring, refactoring query problems, giving lunch-and-learn sessions, writing blog posts, onboarding new engineers, and mentoring junior team members. (source)
Spinach AI helps managers run effective meetings, hit goals, and share performance feedback faster. It offers features for one-on-ones, goal tracking, and performance reviews, supporting high-performing teams. (source)
Spinach AI provides a comprehensive library of over 180 engineering goal examples, categorized by role and objective. You can access the goal examples library at this link.
Managers should use goals as a framework to guide decisions and activities, regularly revisit them in meetings, and provide ongoing feedback. This prevents goals from being filed away and ensures continuous progress. (source)
Establish smaller, manageable quarterly goals that support annual objectives. Communicate how these goals contribute to the organization's big picture, and use one-on-one meetings to track progress and motivation. (source)
Managers can set goals such as leading projects, mentoring new hires, improving technical communication, and providing opportunities for professional development. These actions help engineers build skills and advance their careers. (source)
VPs of Engineering can implement one-on-one programs, introduce improvement themes, operate as anti-racist leaders, mentor managers, and sponsor paths for BIPOC contributors. (source)
Spinach AI provides tools for one-on-one meetings, goal tracking, and performance reviews. It helps managers capture feedback, set clear goals, and monitor progress, supporting high-performing engineering teams. (source)
Spinach AI offers automated note-taking, action item tracking, instant documentation, integration with CRMs and project management tools, sprint planning, daily standup automation, and AI-powered insights from user interviews. (source)
Yes, Spinach AI integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack, Jira, Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Linear, Monday.com, Notion, Confluence, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, Attio, BambooHR, Rippling, Workday, OKTA, SCIM, Zapier, NetSuite, and SAP. (source)
Yes, Spinach AI offers a Transcript & AI Summary API, available across all plans. The API allows users to access transcripts and AI-generated summaries for enhanced integration and automation. (source)
Spinach AI offers printed and digital instructions, online help files, technical documentation, and user manuals. These resources are available at the Help Center (link).
Spinach AI automates drafting meeting recaps, proposals, updating CRM systems, and tracking action items, reducing time spent on administrative work and enabling teams to focus on core responsibilities. (source)
The Starter plan is free and includes unlimited meeting recording, transcription, and basic AI summaries. (source)
The Pro plan uses a pay-as-you-go model starting at $2.90 per meeting hour. It is designed for unlimited users and includes advanced AI features. (source)
The Business plan is a per-user plan with unlimited meetings and advanced AI. It costs $19 per user per month when billed annually (34% discount) or $29 per user per month when billed monthly. (source)
The Enterprise plan is a custom plan for organizations requiring advanced security, control, and customization. Pricing is determined through consultation with the sales team and volume discounts are available. (source)
Spinach AI is certified for SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and HIPAA, ensuring adherence to industry-leading security and privacy standards. (source)
Spinach AI uses best-in-class encryption, access controls, and intrusion detection software. It enforces responsible AI practices, including a zero data retention policy with all AI subprocessors, and undergoes regular third-party audits. (source)
Descript is known for audio/video editing and transcription. Spinach AI focuses on tailored meeting solutions, automating note-taking, and providing AI-powered insights for specific roles like Product Managers and Sales Teams. (source)
Fireflies.ai offers transcription and meeting summaries. Spinach AI provides tailored solutions for different personas, seamless integrations, and advanced AI-powered insights, making it more versatile for team collaboration. (source)
Otter.ai specializes in fast transcription. Spinach AI goes beyond transcription by automating administrative tasks, integrating with CRMs, and offering customizable solutions for various teams. (source)
Meetgeek provides meeting summaries and insights for remote teams. Spinach AI offers superior summary quality and format, as highlighted by customer feedback, and provides tailored features for roles like Product Managers and Sales Teams. (source)
Spinach AI is designed for Product Managers, Sales Teams, Customer Success Teams, Engineering Teams, HR and Recruiting Teams, and Marketing Teams. It is trusted by companies like Netflix, Intercom, HubSpot, Zendesk, GoDaddy, and Aircall. (source)
Customers can expect time savings, improved workflow efficiency, enhanced decision-making, increased productivity, better customer engagement, and cost efficiency. Spinach AI automates note-taking, meeting recaps, and CRM updates, enabling teams to focus on strategic tasks. (source)
Spinach AI is designed for rapid implementation. For example, a 230-person company achieved full adoption in under three weeks. Free account setup, onboarding programs, dedicated customer success managers, and priority support are available. (source)
Customers praise Spinach AI for its intuitive interface and seamless integration. Josh Guttman, CRO at Altrio, described it as easy to install and constantly delivering new features. Dan Robidoux, Tech Lead at Careviso, called it a silent cornerstone for daily work. (source)
Kushal Birje, Senior Director of Revenue Operations at EDB, said Spinach AI changed how their team handles meetings and projects. Belén Medina from Do It Consulting Group stated their team communicates better than ever. Jason Oliver, Product Director, praised its specificity for product management. (source)
Spinach.ai is enterprise-ready, offering robust security and compliance with SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and HIPAA certifications. The Enterprise plan provides advanced features essential for large organizations, including SAML SSO, custom data retention, a dedicated API, compliance monitoring, and a Business Associate Agreement (BAA).
In this article, we'll walk through how engineering managers can set goals for high-performing teams, including role-specific and professional development examples to help get you started.
Jay Gadi
What do high-performing engineering teams have in common? If you answered a snazzy tech stack or nap pods, guess again. Although we’re hardly the ones to argue against a well-rested brain, the real secret of these teams is effective goal-setting.
Simply put, effective engineering teams know what their goals are, and are equipped with the resources, tools, and support they need to demolish them.
TL;DR
Before you can determine specific goals for your team, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your organization’s broader goals. In other words, goals should flow from company-wide objectives down to your team and individual contributors. This keeps everyday tasks and responsibilities aligned with business priorities.
Beyond keeping everyone on the same page, cascading goals are also linked with productivity. According to Gallup, employee productivity increases by 56% when managers are involved in helping their reports align their goals with the needs of the organization.
In fact, according to Gallup, employees who can link their individual goals to those of the organization are 3.5 times more likely to be engaged.
A report by Harvard Business Review also found that the second most important driver of employee engagement was that individuals have a clear understanding of how their job contributes to business strategy.
Don’t take new goals to your team until they’ve been fully fleshed out. Some questions you should be able to answer as an engineering manager include:
The more detailed and specific you can get, the less room there is for misinterpretation. Attach key information to your goals, like actual numbers, milestones, KPIs, and any important deadlines.
Remember, every goal should be measurable.
Anyone can hand a goal to someone else, but actually involving your team in the process will help your reports feel personally invested and more inclined to take ownership.
Using an idea management tool is an easy way to capture your team’s feedback during the goal-setting process. You can also add an item around goal brainstorming in your weekly team meeting. When you open up the floor to new ideas, perspectives, and dialogue, you could be rewarded with valuable insights.
For instance, if your team doesn’t think a particular goal is feasible, it’s better to know that in advance, before it’s set in stone. Or maybe you can afford to be even more ambitious.
It’s also important to regularly speak one-on-one with your reports about their goals, so you can track their progress, provide coaching, recognize success, and spot any roadblocks along the way. If a direct report is struggling to meet their individual goals, for instance, don’t wait for the annual review to provide feedback.
But remember that not every engineer approaches one-on-ones the same. So cater these conversations to each individual on your team.
Frequent communication is especially important as more companies switch to remote work.
Revisiting goals with your team regularly will also help keep them from getting lost in the daily workflow. “Even the most finely crafted objectives will have little impact if they are filed away for 363 days of the year. To drive strategy execution, goals should serve as a framework that guides key decisions and activities throughout the year,” says Donald Sull, Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management
Pro tip: Spinach is an AI meeting assistant that captures decisions, action items, and named owners from any meeting and routes them in real time into the tools your team already uses, from Slack and Jira to Asana and Linear. For engineering managers running goal-tracking one-on-ones, that means every coaching note, committed action, and owner gets structured and routed before the call ends, so goal progress is visible where work actually happens and nothing falls through the cracks between check-ins.
According to a Dominican University of California study, individuals are 42% more likely to achieve their goals when they write them down. Fortunately, there are different frameworks available to help you map out your engineering team goals effectively. These include:
The OKR methodology originated at Intel and is used by companies like Google, Netflix, Twitter, Deloitte, Zynga… even Spinach AI! Also known as “Objectives and Key Results”, this approach identifies objectives, each defining a particular goal to be achieved. The objectives are subsequently connected to milestones or key results in order to measure progress.
Don’t go overboard, if your list of key results is too long, people won’t remember them. Aim to hit that sweet spot of 2-5 key results for every objective. To help manage OKRs, try the traffic light system.
Hot Tip: If you’re not sure where to start, Spinach AI has a guide for how to write OKRs and offers over 240 handy OKR goal examples.
In goal setting, ambiguity is your enemy. The SMART approach forces you to frame your goals so that they’re:
This methodology is particularly helpful because it provides a manageable list of criteria for your engineering team goals to meet before you actually commit.
As a manager, it’s up to you to determine your engineering team’s goals and track them against KPIs. If you’re not sure where to start, here are some common engineering KPIs to consider:
Category | KPI | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
Code Quality | Code coverage | Percentage of codebase covered by automated tests |
Code Quality | Number of bugs | Defects found in production or during QA |
Code Quality | Code quality SLA | Adherence to defined quality standards and thresholds |
Code Quality | Test case coverage | Proportion of features and scenarios covered by test cases |
Delivery Speed | Number of releases | Frequency of deployments shipped to production |
Delivery Speed | PR review rate and merge time | How quickly pull requests are reviewed and merged |
Delivery Speed | Number of comments per pull request | Review depth and collaboration effort on each PR |
Team Velocity | Story points completed | Volume of work delivered per sprint |
Team Velocity | Velocity | Consistent rate of delivery across sprints |
Team Velocity | Burndown rate | Progress against planned work remaining in a sprint |
Performance | Application speed and load times | End-user response times and page load performance |
Performance | Average downtime | Time the system is unavailable or degraded |
Operations | Running costs | Infrastructure and total spend over time |
Operations | Workload balance | Distribution of tasks and effort across team members |
Retention | Developer delta or turnover rate | Rate at which engineers join or leave the team |
Here’s what these might look like when set as goals:
Senior Engineering Manager goal examples
DevOps goal examples
Senior Software Engineer goal examples
Junior Software Engineer goal examples
Lofty goals can overwhelm any team, making it difficult to manage priorities and stay on track. That’s why it’s important to set smaller, quarterly goals for your reports to work towards.
On the flip side, you don’t want to lose sight of the big picture. As manager, it’s your responsibility to communicate to your team how their quarterly goals support your organization’s annual goals.
Don’t assume everyone on your team aspires to become a manager someday. For one, being a people manager is hard work, and often requires learning a brand new skillset. Some folks are perfectly happy to spend their entire careers working as individual contributors.
That’s okay.
The important thing is that you take the time to speak with your reports and learn their personal and career goals. Once you know what everyone is working towards, you’ll be able to make sure the goals you set push your team and organization towards success while keeping your reports motivated and on track to hit their personal goals as well.
One-on-one meetings are the perfect opportunity to gauge how your reports are feeling about their personal and career goals.
If you’re looking to better understand what career aspirations your team has, here are some one-on-one questions you can ask:
Check out some of these examples to help inspire professional development goals for your team:
See more engineering goal examples
See more engineering goal examples
See more engineering goal examples
See more engineering goal examples
Let’s walk through some goal examples for common engineering roles:
Objective: Improve our code quality
KPIs:
Objective: Flex your technical skills
KPIs:
View more Software Engineer goal examples
Objective: Implement a one-on-one program across engineering to build better communication between managers and their direct reports
KPIs:
Objective: Operate as an anti-racist leader
KPIs:
View more VP, Engineering goal examples
Objective: Implement a trending system to monitor key time series infrastructure data
KPIs:
Objective: Back up critical systems nightly
KPIs:
View more DevOps goal examples
Objective: Improve our backend code quality
KPIs:
Objective: Improve your communication and mentorship skills
KPIs:
It depends on your team’s needs, but OKRs and SMART goals are the two most widely used frameworks. OKRs work well when you want to connect individual work to company-wide objectives — each objective gets 2–5 measurable key results so progress is trackable and priorities stay visible. SMART goals are useful when you need a quick sanity check: before committing to a goal, verify it’s Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. Many engineering teams use both: OKRs for quarterly alignment, SMART criteria to pressure-test each key result before it goes live.
Start from the top. Company-wide priorities should cascade down to team goals, and from there to individual contributor goals. Before bringing any goal to your team, you should be able to answer: how does this support our organization’s broader objectives? Gallup research cited in this post found that employees who can link their individual goals to organizational ones are 3.5 times more likely to be engaged — and that manager involvement in goal alignment increases productivity by 56%. Cascading goals aren’t just good practice; they’re a measurable driver of output.
Regularly — not just at annual reviews. One-on-ones are the right venue: use them to track progress, surface blockers early, provide coaching, and recognize wins before they go unnoticed. For remote or hybrid teams, this matters even more, since you can’t rely on informal hallway conversations. Tools like Spinach AI join your one-on-ones and automatically extract decisions, action items, and owners in real time — routing them into Jira, Linear, Asana, or Slack so nothing falls through the cracks between check-ins.
The most commonly tracked KPIs fall into five categories: code quality (code coverage, bug count, test case coverage), delivery speed (number of releases, PR review and merge time), team velocity (story points completed, burndown rate), system performance (load times, average downtime), and team health (developer turnover rate, workload balance). The right mix depends on your team’s current priorities — a team focused on reliability will weight performance KPIs heavily, while a team scaling output will focus on velocity and delivery speed.
Don’t assume the management track is the goal. Many engineers prefer to grow as individual contributors — deeper technical expertise, broader system ownership, mentorship of junior engineers, or cross-functional influence. The key is asking directly: use one-on-ones to learn what each person is working toward. Once you know their personal goals, you can set development objectives that advance both their individual career and your team’s technical capabilities — expanding the professional network, building technical knowledge through courses or books, or taking the lead on complex projects are all legitimate growth paths that don’t require moving into management.
You made it to the end of this article! Here are some things you can do now:
helps managers run better
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