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

by Josh Seiden

And as we answered those questions, we started to come up with a list of things we wanted to work on. Instead of the vague (impact-level) request to increase NPS, instead we had a much more actionable set of things to work on: we want to increase the rate at which buyers and sellers meet early in the process. We want to decrease the rate at which buyers and sellers fail to meet due to problems of location. Both of these goals are outcomes: they are very specific and measurable rates of behavior. In this example, the team chose to stop there, and express the roadmap in terms of the questions we were trying to answer. (“How might we encourage buyers and sellers to meet early in the process?”) We could have taken it one step further, and come up with a list of ideas for how we could encourage early meetings, and included those ideas in the roadmap. If you want to do that though, my recommendation is to avoid making a roadmap that’s filled with answers and ideas. Instead, build the roadmap around hypotheses that link question and potential answer together. For example, you might say something like: We believe that if we increase the rate at which buyers and sellers meet early in the process, it will lead to more successful transactions (as measured by X) and higher user satisfaction (as measured by NPS.) We think we can increase the rate of early meetings [with this idea] and [with this idea] and [with this idea.] We will work on testing these ideas in Q1 of the coming year.