Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success

by Josh Seiden

To do that they broke the year into quarters, and began holding goal-setting meetings with the executive leadership. The idea was to understand and agree on the top three outcomes executives wanted to get to in the next quarter. “We have annual goals,” Hellweg said, “but we look at them each quarter to find the top three near-term goals.” After that, the product managers would share and discuss the Executive Goals for the quarter with functional stakeholders (marketing, sales, editorial, e-commerce, etc), then solicit their input regarding what to work on next. They asked stakeholders to make their initial requests for work by submitting tickets. A crucial difference this time was that they asked stakeholders to be more outcome-oriented. Instead of requesting features, “the ticket submission template asked for the problem, the hypotheses, baseline data, and what they hoped to achieve.” Emily told me. ”That made everything more problem-focused.” In other words, they were asking stakeholders to think about the outcomes they wanted to create.