OKRs and Roadmaps: Understanding the Difference and How to Use Them Together

As an engineering leader, you are likely familiar with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and Roadmaps. While these terms are often used interchangeably, they are concepts that serve different purposes.

KRs and initiatives

In this previous post, we talked about OKRs. OKRs are an alignment tool to measure and track the outcome of a team/org.

A Key Result (KR) defines a measurable goal that tracks progress around a strategic objective.

This defined goal, to be completed, must be associated with one or more initiatives.

An initiative is an actionable project with deliverables.

A KR with initiatives in the real world

Let’s say our Objective is to: “Improve the Page Load of the Homepage on Web”, and a KR is “Decrease by 7% the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric for the Homepage page by the end of the quarter”.

LCP is one of the Core Web Vitals metrics to measure page speed. From the web.dev website, LCP can be defined as “an important, user-centric metric for measuring perceived load speed because it marks the point in the page load timeline when the page’s main content has likely loaded.”