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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Josh Seiden
Read between
October 24 - October 25, 2020
an outcome is a change in human behavior that drives business results.
outcomes are the changes in customer, user, employee behavior that lead to good things for your company, your organization, or whomever is the focus of your work.
It’s common to get caught in this kind of confusion—mistaking “making stuff” for making progress, and mistaking shipping features for being done.
Why not just make an endless list of features and ask our teams to work on that list—forever? In fact, a lot of contemporary project management turns out to work exactly this way.
The problem with this approach is that features can be finished and delivered and “work perfectly” but still not deliver any value.
if features don’t automatically create value, then it follows that we shouldn’t use them as the center of our planning process. In fact, we want to use a planning process that makes it possible to make as little stuff as possible and still achieve the outcome we seek.
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.
To see if our work is actually making a difference, we need checkpoints that are smaller, measurable, and more closely connected to the work that we’re doing.
you can manage a team by telling them what to make: that’s called managing outputs. It’s a problem because features don’t always deliver value. You can manage a team by asking them to target some high-level value, like growing revenue. That’s called managing impact. It’s a problem because it’s not specific enough.
What you want is to manage with outcomes: ask teams to create a specific customer behavior that drives business results. That allows them to find the right solution, and keeps them focused on delivering value.
our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of value.
If an outcome is a change in customer behavior that drives business results, we could have asked, “what is the customer behavior change that we are looking for?”
When you start thinking critically about value delivery instead of features, you very quickly run into a problem: how can we be sure that the stuff we’re making is actually going to deliver value?
This is why, when working with outcomes, you need a companion tool: the experiment.
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.
Takeaways for Managers You can manage a team by telling them what to make: that’s called managing outputs. It’s a problem, because features don’t always deliver value. You can manage a team by asking them to create some high-level value, like growing revenue. That’s called managing impact. It’s a problem because it’s not specific enough. What you want is to manage with outcomes: ask teams to create a specific customer behavior that drives business results. That allows them to find the right solution, and keeps them focused on delivering value. For our purposes, an outcome is “a change in
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If we work inside an organization, the ultimate goal of our work is to help make our organizations more successful.
To find the right outcomes to work on, we start with a simple question: “what are the customer behaviors that drive business results?”
because outcomes are things people do, they’re both observable and measurable. This is an incredibly important part of outcomes because it lets us use them as a management tool.
first, that an outcome is a human behavior that drives business results, and second, to figure them out, we just need to understand what our customers are doing that drives the results that we care about.
our indicators are the customer behaviors that drive the business results we’re seeking.
If we don’t have the data to support our hunches, then we have to treat the ideas differently than if we know our ideas are true. We have to treat them as assumptions.
A basic hypothesis has two parts: what we believe, and the evidence we’re seeking to know if we’re right or wrong.
What are the user and customer behaviors that drive business results? (This is the outcome that we’re trying to create.) How can we get people to do more of those behaviors? (These are the features, policy changes, promotions, etc that we’ll do to try to create the outcomes.) How do we know that we’re right? (This uncovers the dynamics of the system, as well as the tests and metrics we’ll use to measure our progress.)
The solution to this is to try to communicate in terms of outcomes AND the effect you want them to have on the impact the leader cares about.
When leaders have teams that are working with well-defined outcomes, tracking progress becomes simpler—leaders and teams can review the hypotheses the teams are working on, they can review their progress towards the outcomes they’re seeking, and they can look at a concrete measure: are people’s behaviors changing?
“what (user/customer/employee) behaviors has this initiative created that are driving business results?”
Takeaways for Managers Don’t mistake impact—high-level aspirational goals—for outcomes. Impact is important, but it’s too big for any one group to target. Use the magic questions to define outcomes: what are the human behaviors that drive business results? How can we get people to do more of these things? How will we know we’re right? Remember that by “humans” we mean customers, users, employees, stakeholders, or anyone involved in the system that we’re building. When you’re planning work, be clear about your assumptions. Be prepared to test your assumptions by expressing work as hypotheses.
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A customer journey is an idea from the world of service design. It’s a simple idea: you make a diagram that reads from left to right and describes what people are doing (their “journey”) when they interact with your product or service.
you can also map the journey of the other people who are delivering the service:
Takeaways for Managers Planning with outputs limits teams’ agility and problem-solving flexibility. Increase teams’ capabilities here by planning around outcomes Create outcomes-based roadmaps that list questions, themes, and outcomes instead of features. One way to find outcomes is to create Customer Journey Maps. These maps help visualize how systems work in terms of customer (and employee) behavior, and so can help you find important outcomes in the system.
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.
If we create this outcome for the user, it will deliver this outcome for the business.
One of the appeals of output-oriented approaches is that stakeholders like the concrete certainty of the plans. They like knowing what features teams are working on.
Takeaways for Managers When considering organizational change, take a customer-centric approach with your colleagues. What are their goals? What value can you offer to them in order to get them to “buy” the change you are selling? Frame organizational change initiatives in terms of outcomes. What are the new behaviors you want to create in the organization? What will people be doing differently when your change program is successful? Changing people’s behavior is hard, and not easy to predict or plan on paper. Instead, take an action-oriented approach: experiment your way forward to make
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