When you have parent OKRs with contributing children, calculating accurate progress isn't as simple as just averaging percentages. Should you sum revenue from different customer tiers, or average progress across strategic initiatives? Should a hiring goal aggregate headcount across departments, or does it need manual updates?

Rhythms uses AI to analyze the semantic meaning of your parent and child goals, automatically determining the right calculation method. This intelligent rollup ensures your parent progress accurately reflects reality—whether that means summing contributions, averaging efforts, or recognizing when automatic calculation isn't appropriate.

For an overview of how progress and status rollup work together, see Understanding OKR Automatic Rollup.

How this helps:

Rhythms uses AI rollup differently depending on your goal's tracking method:

Metric-Based Goals (Always AI-Powered) Goals tracking specific metrics—revenue, headcount, feature counts—always use AI rollup. This ensures accurate aggregation across different metric types and cannot be disabled.

Progress-Based Goals (Optional AI) Goals tracking 0-100% completion respect your organization's AI rollup settings. If disabled, they fall back to simple averaging.

Progress-based tracking (0-100%): Track overall completion as a percentage. Used by default for Objectives and Initiatives. Progress updates manually during check-ins, or automatically for parent Objectives based on child Key Results (when using automatic rollup).

Metric-based tracking (specific numbers): Track actual values and let Rhythms calculate progress. Used by default for Key Results. Progress updates by entering current values during check-ins or automatically through auto-updates from connected tools.

You can switch between methods anytime on the OKR detail page by clicking "Change to metric-based" or "Change to progress-based."

Rhythms analyzes your parent and child goals to determine the appropriate calculation method. For metric-based goals, this analysis always runs to ensure accurate aggregation. For progress-based goals, the analysis runs only if AI rollup is enabled in your organization settings. When the analysis runs, the system identifies two primary patterns:

Aggregation (Summing): When children represent parts of a whole that combine to form the parent

Averaging: When children represent separate efforts working toward the parent

This happens automatically every time contributing children update—no manual configuration required.

Aggregation is used when your parent goal has a numeric target and children represent portions that add up to that target.

Revenue Goals:

Hiring Goals:

Feature/Deliverable Goals:

Customer Acquisition:

Parent Goal: Achieve $2M ARR from SaaS subscriptions

Contributing Children:

How Rhythms Calculates:

❌ Wrong approach (averaging): (83.3% + 60% + 50%) / 3 = 64.4%

✅ Right approach (aggregation): $1M + $300K + $150K = $1.45M

Parent progress: $1.45M / $2M = 72.5%

Why aggregation? Rhythms detects:

This gives you accurate progress—you're 72.5% to your $2M goal, not 64.4%.

The AI analyzes:

1. Parent title patterns:

2. Metric compatibility:

3. Semantic relationships:

4. Target alignment:

When these patterns align, Rhythms uses aggregation automatically.

Averaging is used when children represent separate efforts working toward a common outcome, rather than portions that sum to a target.

Strategic Initiatives:

Quality Improvements:

Cross-Functional Goals:

By default, all contributing children have equal impact on parent progress. This means if you have three Key Results at 80%, 60%, and 40% progress, your parent Objective shows 60% progress—the simple average.

The calculation:

This equal weight model works well for most teams because:

When equal weights work best:

⚠️ Availability: This feature must be enabled by your organization admin. If you don't see weight controls in your goal views, your organization uses the default equal weight averaging. If you need weight controls, ask your admin to request this feature be enabled by the Rhythms Support team.

Custom weights allow you to assign different importance levels (0-100%) to each contributing child, rather than treating all children equally. This lets you model strategic priorities where some work matters more than others.

Use cases:

Without custom weights (equal averaging):

With custom weights:

Key principle: Higher weight = greater impact on parent progress.

Prerequisites:

Steps:

What happens:

Example 1: Strategic Prioritization

Parent: Complete Q4 Strategic Priorities

Parent progress: 40% + 18% + 8% = 66%

Equal weights would show 60%, but the weighted calculation reflects that Enterprise expansion (the most important work) is actually doing well at 80%.

Example 2: Lead Indicators at 0% Weight

Parent: Close 10 Enterprise Deals

Parent progress: 30% (from closed deals only)

Lead indicators remain visible for early warning signals but don't inflate progress with predictive metrics. See "Lead vs. Lag Indicators" section below for why this matters.

Rhythms automatically normalizes weights to percentages, so you can think in ratios:

Input:

Normalized (automatic):

You can enter weights as absolute numbers or percentages—both work the same way.

DO:

DON'T:

Who can edit weights:

Visibility:

Not every aligned child needs to contribute to parent progress. You control which children affect the parent's calculated progress.

To enable or disable contribution:

When to enable contribution:

When to disable contribution:

Children with contribution disabled remain visible in the alignment hierarchy, they just don't affect parent progress or status.

Understanding lead vs. lag indicators is critical for configuring contribution correctly:

Lag indicators (results) - Enable contribution ✅

Lead indicators (predictive) - Disable contribution ❌

💡 Organizational Best Practice: Disabling contribution for lead indicators is a recommended approach based on OKR methodology, not a system-enforced rule. The system treats all metrics equally—it's up to you to configure settings that reflect your measurement strategy.

Why this matters: If lead indicators contribute, your parent might show 80% progress based on pipeline while actual results are at 20%. This creates false confidence and masks real problems.

Recommended pattern: Align lead indicators to the parent for visibility and early warnings, but set contribution weight to 0% (or disable contribution) so only actual results drive parent progress.

Sometimes Rhythms detects that automatic rollup isn't appropriate—typically when the parent measures an outcome but children measure activities that influence it.

Parent: Grow team to 200 employees (requires actual headcount number)

Children:

Why no rollup:

What happens: Rhythms recognizes the incompatibility and doesn't calculate parent progress automatically. You need to update the parent manually with actual headcount in check-ins.

Other no-rollup scenarios:

In these cases, switch the parent to Manual mode and update progress through check-ins based on your judgment and actual data.

Rhythms analyzes your goal titles, metric types, and semantic relationships to determine the appropriate calculation. For example, if your parent is "Achieve $2M revenue" with children for different customer tiers, Rhythms detects this should be summed. If your parent is "Complete strategic initiatives" with separate workstreams, it uses averaging. This happens automatically.

Yes. Click on the parent's progress value to see the "Contributing Items" section, which shows how each child contributes and which calculation method is being used.

If automatic rollup doesn't accurately reflect your goal's reality, you can switch the parent to Manual mode. This gives you full control to update progress based on your judgment. Click the progress value and select "Update manually" from the dropdown.

For averaging calculations, yes. When contribution is enabled, all children have equal impact unless your organization has custom weights enabled and you've configured specific weights. For aggregation calculations, Rhythms sums the actual values regardless of weights.

When you set a child to Postponed status, Rhythms automatically sets its contribution weight to 0 and excludes it from parent progress calculation. This prevents paused work from creating false progress signals or making the parent appear ahead/behind based on inactive work. When you reactivate the child by changing status back to an active state (On Track, Behind, At Risk), it resumes contributing to the parent.

No. Lead indicators predict future performance but aren't actual results. Disable contribution (or set weight to 0%) so they don't inflate parent progress. Align them for visibility and early warnings only.

Only if your organization has custom weights enabled. If enabled, click the weight icon next to one of the aligned children and enter custom percentages.

No. 0% weight items remain visible in alignment views, reports, and dashboards. They just don't affect parent progress or status.

For averaging calculations, remaining weights are automatically renormalized. For aggregation calculations, the sum adjusts to reflect the removed contribution.

Only if they're compatible. For example, revenue in USD from different sources can be summed. But you can't sum revenue with headcount—Rhythms will recognize this and either use averaging (if progress percentages make sense) or indicate manual mode is needed.

Understanding rollup concepts: See Understanding OKR Automatic Rollup for how progress and status rollup work together and when to use automatic vs. manual modes.

Understanding status calculation: See Automatic Status Rollup for Parent OKRs for how status is computed and when to override with strategic judgment.

Tracking progress: See Effective Check-ins to Track OKR Progress in Rhythms for how to conduct check-ins and update OKR progress.