Engineering Management Frameworks

Engineering leaders are ultimately judged on whether their teams build the right things — not just build things right.

Strategic alignment frameworks solve the "are we working on the right things?" problem.

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

• Invented at Intel by Andy Grove and popularized by Google.
• Objective: a qualitative, inspiring goal ("Become the most trusted payment platform in Europe").
• Key Results: 3–5 measurable outcomes that prove you achieved it ("Reduce transaction failure rate to <0.1%", "Achieve 99.99% uptime", "Grow monthly active merchants by 40%").
• Aim for ~70% completion; 100% means the goal was too easy.
• Cadence: typically set quarterly with an annual north star.
• Fintech note: OKRs often focus on uptime SLAs, throughput, fraud rate, or CAC.

North Star Metric

One single outcome metric that best represents the value your product delivers to customers.

• Examples: Stripe’s "Total Payment Volume", a social app’s "Daily Active Users", a lending platform’s "Loans Originated".
• Not a business metric (revenue) — an outcome that drives revenue.
• Aligns engineering, product, and business on a single source of truth.

V2MOM (Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures)

Created by Marc Benioff at Salesforce and used from the CEO level down to teams.

• Vision: What do we want to achieve?
• Values: What principles guide decisions?
• Methods: How will we execute?
• Obstacles: What is in our way? (naming blockers such as compliance, tech debt, or staffing constraints)
• Measures: How do we know we succeeded?

For regulated industries the explicit “Obstacles” line is a game‑changer; it forces leaders to call out compliance, audits, legacy systems, etc.

Cadence: OKRs quarterly, North Star reviewed monthly, V2MOM set annually with quarterly check‑ins.