Don't Split Your Key Result Into a Title and a Description
A common habit when writing Key Results is to keep the title short and put the real detail somewhere else. The title says "Improve onboarding," and a description field underneath explains that it means increasing 7-day activation from 42% to 60% by the end of the quarter. It feels tidy on the screen where you wrote it. It stops being tidy the moment that Key Result shows up anywhere else.
Where People Actually See a Key Result
Most people never open the Key Result and read its description. They see it on a dashboard next to eleven other rows. They see it in a weekly check-in list where they have thirty seconds to update a number. They see it in a slide someone pulled together for a leadership review. In every one of these places, only the title is visible. If the title is a vague fragment like "Improve onboarding," the reader has no idea what "improve" means, what number is being tracked, or what counts as success, unless they stop and go dig for the description, which in practice almost nobody does.
The Description Becomes a Place Where Detail Goes to Die
This isn't a hypothetical risk. Once the real definition of a metric lives only in a description field, it gets forgotten by the very team that wrote it. Three weeks in, a team member updates the Key Result based on their own guess at what "improve onboarding" means, maybe they log a change in signup volume instead of activation rate, and nobody catches the mismatch until the end-of-quarter review. Two people on the same team can end up tracking two different numbers under the same title without anyone noticing, simply because the title never said which one it was.
The Rule: The Title Is the Definition
A Key Result's title should be a complete, standalone sentence that anyone could understand with zero additional context. It should name the metric, the starting point, the target, and the timeframe, all in one line. "Increase 7-day activation from 42% to 60% by end of Q3" tells the full story on its own. Nobody reading it needs to click through to a description to know what's being measured or what winning looks like. This lines up with the standard advice for writing Key Results as outcomes rather than vague intentions, the kind of specificity Harvard Business Review has long argued is what separates a real target from a wish.
What Description Fields Are Still Good For
None of this means description fields are useless. They're the right place for context that helps someone understand the "why" behind a Key Result: a link to the dashboard where the number is pulled from, a note about which cohort is being measured, or the reasoning for why this particular target was chosen over a more aggressive one. What a description should never carry is the core definition of what's being measured. If removing the description would make the Key Result meaningless, the real metric was written in the wrong field.
A Side-by-Side Example
Vague title, buried description. Title: "Improve onboarding." Description: "We want to raise the percentage of new users who complete key setup steps within their first week, currently around 42%, up to roughly 60% by the end of the quarter." Anyone scanning a dashboard sees only "Improve onboarding" and has to guess at everything else.
Complete, standalone title. Title: "Increase 7-day activation from 42% to 60% by end of Q3." Description (optional): "Activation is defined as completing account setup and inviting one teammate. Source: product analytics dashboard, updated weekly." The title alone tells the full story. The description adds useful context but isn't required to understand what's being tracked.
How to Check Your Own Key Results
Read only the title of each Key Result out loud, without looking at the description. If you can't tell what number is being tracked, where it started, where it's headed, or by when, the title needs to be rewritten. This single check catches most of the vague Key Results that quietly derail a quarter, and it costs nothing more than a few extra words in the title itself.