What are OKR weights?
The weight assigned to an objective or a key result determines its impact on the higher-level goal. By default, each element has a weight = 1. That means that all contributing elements of an OKR, have an equal impact on its progress. But sometimes you may have an objective with key results that don’t seem to have an equal value to the overall goal. Let’s see that on an example:
Objective: Make our website more accessible
KR1: Perform 3 tests resulting in knowing our position against the current standards
KR2 (auto): Improve the website by fixing all tests' findings
KR3: Perform 5 user tests checking the accessibility in real life
You could say that KR1 is a lot easier to achieve than KR2 and KR3 - it will take less effort and less time to put your website through 3 automatic tests and create a report than to redesign and re-implement the website. While comparing KR3 and KR2 you also might say that it would take a bit less effort to achieve KR3, than to achieve KR2. In this case, you could assign the following weights to the key results:
Objective: Make our website more accessible
KR1: Perform 3 tests resulting in knowing our position against the current standards (weight: 1, completing it will mean achieving 16,6% of the objective)
KR2 (auto): Improve the website by fixing all tests' findings (weight: 3, completing it will mean achieving 50% of the objective)
KR3: Perform 5 user tests checking the accessibility in real life (weight: 2, completing it will mean achieving 33,3% of the objective)
Similarly for the objectives. You could decide that one sub-objective will engage more people, time, and effort or is simply more important, thus it should have a bigger weight than other sub-objectives.
How do the weights work inside the product?
Creating OKRs with weights
When you fill in the form for both KR and objective, in the end, there is a “Weight” field. By default, it’s 1, but you can change it to any value. Next to it you can see the “Contribution” which states what part of the higher-level objective, the OKR you’re creating will take. The contribution depends on how many other contributing elements the higher-level OKR has and what are their weights.
If you’re creating the first KR for an objective, the contribution will be 100%, no matter the weight. But the more KRs you add, the less contribution it will have.
If you’re creating an objective and it doesn’t have any higher-level objective assigned yet, you won’t be able to add weight to it, as it doesn’t make sense for the top-level objectives to have weights. After you select an objective from the dropdown, the weight field would be available.
A weight = 0 would mean that this element’s progress is not contributing to the progress of its objective.
Editing the weights
After you create a new KR or an objective and land on Created OKRs page, you can see the weight along with other information on the side panel:
When you click on the pencil icon, a dialog appears with a list of all other elements contributing to the higher-level objective, along with the one you’ve just created. You can edit all their weights here.
Another place to edit the weights would be on a detail page of any of the sub-objectives/ KRs. On each page with a weight assigned, you will have a “Weight” field in the Info section.
After clicking on the pencil icon, you will see the dialog with all other elements contributing to the same objective.
Also, on the higher-level objective, in the children section, you can see the weight of each element on its card:
