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

by Josh Seiden

Outcomes, or the human behaviors that drive business results, are what happen when you deliver the right features. Ideally, they happen when you’ve delivered as few features as possible.

Setting goals as outcomes sounds simple, but it can be hard to do in practice. One thing that makes it hard is that we often set goals that are too high level—we tell a team to make our business more profitable, or to reduce risk, or something else that’s really a factor of many variables. These impact-level targets are too complex to be useful to our teams. Instead, we need to ask our teams to work on outcomes—the smaller, more manageable targets that, taken together, will create the impact we want. We do this by asking them to focus on changing customer behavior in a way that drives business results.

When you combine outcome-based targets with a process that’s based on running experiments, you really start to unlock the power of agile approaches.

Good leaders know to ask their teams to deliver value—in other words, don’t just deliver stuff, instead, do something that creates value for the organization. But “value” is a tricky word—it’s too vague to really get people aligned.

One thing that makes it difficult to use outcomes inside larger organizations is that they’re almost never organized around achieving outcomes. Instead they’re organized around making stuff.

In outcome-based work, teams need to be really clear about the value they are trying to create, and they do this by specifying two critical outcomes of the work: the outcome they are seeking for the customer or user, and the outcome they are seeking for the business. These two outcomes must be linked.