To ensure progress towards this ideal state, OKRs (objectives and key results) are often used to create tangible goalposts along the way. For engineering teams, these objectives often take two forms:
Things that “unblock” progress: Improving security, compliance, and reliability ensures engineers can focus on building new value.
Things that accelerate time to market: Re-platforming or upgrading key parts of the tool chain can drastically accelerate deployment frequency and velocity.
But all of these programs involve moving from one state to another. As simple as that sounds, the act of doing so, successfully, has become incredibly challenging.
Just understanding current state requires a ton of manual effort: Who owns what? What needs to change? Who’s going to do it? Why haven’t they done it yet? How many people still need to act? Today, the answers to these questions are cobbled together via manual input in spreadsheets, project management tools, Slack messages, and unopened emails.
To better understand how teams are handling these challenges, we surveyed 50 engineering managers from around the globe on how they’re tackling big changes in 2025.
Key Findings
1. Modernization is on everyone’s 2025 agenda.
From small startups to enterprise giants, keeping up with the latest technology is a top priority for engineering teams next year. Whether it’s adopting a new cloud platform, upgrading frameworks, eliminating tech debt, or consolidating tools, nearly every respondent shared similar sentiments: staying stagnant isn’t an option.
90% of engineering leaders have an objective to improve (modernize, upgrade, migrate, remove, or add to) their engineering technology stack in 2025.
Here’s just a slice of projects respondents are planning to tackle:
Karunanithi, Eng Manager at a 10,000 person org:
“We plan to modernize our legacy application stack to microservice based architecture improves scalability, reliability and high availability and also reduces resource utlization.”
Urvi, Eng Manager at a 10,000 person org
“We are planning to modernize our front end code since its a really old code base with lot of tech debt. We mainly plan to move from Redux to React Context. We also plan to remove a lot of dead code, experiments and overall do some code clean up.”
Chase, Eng Manager at a 10,0000 person org
“We will need to update our operating system, NodeJS runtime version, and migrate between major versions of the MeteorJS full stack framework which has deprecated use of Fibers as it is no longer supported by the latest LTS NodeJS release.”
Alex, Eng Manager at a 501-1,000 person org
“We’re planning to upgrade old dependencies to more modern frameworks and stacks, move on-prem services over to the cloud, and take advantage of the full power of the cloud to run our workloads.”
Naeem, Eng Manager at a 5,001-10,000 person org
“We will upgrade service and UI frameworks to newer versions and upgrade related dependencies to improve reliability and security, migrate to a new access control structure to support fine-grained permissions for scalability and ease in supporting security and compliance requirements.”
Nicholas, Eng Manager at a 5,000-10,000 person org
“My team has a priority focus on controlling cloud costs and removing premium enterprise options for self hosted open source alternatives or Azure/AWS native solutions. Some of the biggest costs savings will be around replacing our feature flags product, moving key vaults, and self hosting application monitoring and synthetic testing.
Our big takeaway: Modernization projects span an enormous set of use cases—from migrating old tech to pursuing more cost effective solutions—any action your organization takes to future-proof your team’s ability to deliver value, at a manageable cost.
2. Everyone needs to track progress, but few have faith in execution:
Just getting started on any major initiative requires program owners to understand the current state, who owns what, and what should happen next. But our survey audience revealed these foundational pieces are a near-universal challenge.
100% of respondents say they’ll need to track progress against any team initiatives
86% of respondents say executing on these projects will be difficult, with the #1 challenge being driving progress and identifying obstacles, followed by ensuring every person is equipped with exactly what they need to do.
26% of respondents say virtually every engineer on their team will need to take personal action against at least one of their core objectives.
Richard, hailing from a 10,000 person org notes the challenges with tracking progress against these initiatives, in a way that make every engineer feel accountable to their piece of the puzzle:
“We need a better way of displaying a hierarchical view of outcomes. Each employee needs to understand visually how they contribute to the overall goals of the organization. Moreover, automated updates and communications is critical. We spend too much time on status and/or updates especially to executives that dont use tools like Jira.”
Krishna, from a 5,000-10,000 person org also highlights the impact differing priorities can have on org-wide changes:
"Alignment is a big issue. Different teams have different objectives and urgency on these migrations. E.g. A user of our platform is less likely to be motivated to perform an infrastructure migration if they are not getting any new functionality. But some migrations are required for the sake of quality—these are the ones that we see stall out."
Our big takeaway: Engineering managers know and expect these major changes to be difficult, yet the predominant tooling is unequipped to help with the biggest pains of driving action against critical tasks, and ensuring tight communication.
3. Making incremental progress is key, but difficult to scale
At the end of the day these major initiatives must progress alongside day-to-day revenue generating activities. If organizations want to hit their goals in this market, shipping net-new value is just as important as ensuring the systems behind the scenes are safe, scalable, and secure. But it’s not easy to flip back and forth between these areas of focus.
Naeem, eng manager at a 5,000-10,000 person company sums it up:
"In addition to migrations and security/compliance changes, our team is expected to continue to deliver on features as planned or with increasing velocity. With increasing size of services and number of features our team maintains, it is difficult to make steady progress in all areas with a small size team we have. Growing the team with additional resources will definitely help with these initiatives."
Chase, eng manager at a 10,000-person organization echoes the need for incrementality, but also the challenge therin:
"The hardest part about completing these big initiatives is breaking them down into smaller units of work and completing them incrementally instead of a single overall project which you can't claim completion of until 100% of the project is done.”
Our big takeaway: Teams are looking to break work apart in order to make it easier for engineers to make steady progress, but doing so also makes it much harder to track progress against teams and tools that progress at different rates.
4. Outcomes and perceived relative efficiency are contradictory
Survey results overwhelming point to these major changes as being strategic projects that should directly impact each team’s goals.
96% of respondents view the tasks comprising these shifts as strategic, rather than administrative in nature, directly impacting each team’s goals.
However, driving progress against these initiatives seems to be a recurring pain—one that leaders may actually now accept as the default state!
When we asked respondents how they’d rate their efficiency compared to peers, a surprising majority thought they were as, or more, efficient than peers in completing these projects. This is surprising given only 6% said they completed their last major initiative ahead of time.
44% of respondents say that their last major migration was completed behind schedule, while just 6% say work was completed ahead of time.
Yet, 76% of those that admitted to completing this work behind schedule say that they’re doing about the same, or better than peers at completing this work efficiently!
Our big takeaway: We see this contradiction often in emerging markets—high priority task with excessive pain and poor results is often viewed as “par for the course” if no better solution can be imagined. Here we see that despite many engineering leaders completing projects behind schedule, they still think they’re doing pretty well compared to peers.
Conclusion
Engineering OKRs are about transformation—getting from the "before" to the "after." But that journey is rarely smooth. The insights from our survey show that while modernization remains a top priority, the path to achieving it is often blocked by inefficiencies, fragmented ownership, and administrative burdens.
The good news? There’s strength in community! Most engineering leaders are facing very similar challenges, which means the market is ripe for a solution to this problem. Internal Developer Portals evolved for this reason, but whether or not you’re thinking about that technology, opening more conversations with peers about how to tackle these issues will be undoubtedly fruitful for your organization. The future of engineering excellence is yours to build.
