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

by Josh Seiden

an outcome is a change in human behavior that drives business results.

The problem with this approach is that features can be finished and delivered and “work perfectly” but stlll not deliver any value.

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.