Better OKR curves

Something I've learned the hard way about choosing OKRs and planning your team's priorities. Projects that only show late-gating impact, like this…

…are risky choices. Your team may do good work but be unable to show any impact due to, say, choosing to run another round of testing, an external dependency falling through, etc. Pretty demotivating. “Release [feature] and get Y% adoption” skews to this pattern, for any nontrivial feature. 

Diminishing-return projects like this…

…are just as bad. You’ve no incentive to go the extra mile. You get half-arsed and take your foot off the pedal.

Projects like this…

…are happier. People feel the motivating effect of their efforts having some impact, but there's also clear reward for excellence.

'Work' may be the wrong x-axis—Nik Fletcher suggests ‘Investment’, which I like—but hopefully you get the idea.