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

by Josh Seiden

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.

making fewer assumptions and focusing more on early engagement between devs and designers.”

we stop working on something when we’ve made enough progress to feel satisfied.

Instead of requesting features, “the ticket submission template asked for the problem, the hypotheses, baseline data, and what they hoped to achieve.”

problem-focused.”

asking stakeholders to think about the outcomes they ...

Reflecting this idea, they created two outcome-focused teams, one for “buy” and the other for “consume.”

presentation she gave to stakeholders in which the majority of the presentation was an honest reflection on lessons learned.

you have to be open to failing and learning and be open to talking about it.”

Your colleagues are your customers. Everything is an outcome. Everything is an experiment.

They would “buy” the strategy or not based on how well it met their needs, the problems it solved for them, how well it was packaged and marketed, and the value it provided to them.

In large organizations, where people operate very far from end-customers and end-users, we benefit when we use customer-centric approaches with our peers, colleagues, and stakeholders.

created a short list of new leadership behaviors we’d see if our strategy was successful.

outcomes we were seeking as a result of our strategy. With these in mind, the next step was to actually define our strategy.

The behavior targets implied a great deal about what the strategy needed to include, and how it would be expressed. It would need to consist—at a high level anyway—of three easy

When you are trying transform an organization, you are trying to change the way the organization works—in other words, you’re trying to get your co-workers to change their behavior.

Understanding your co-workers’ points of view, their motivations, and the behavior change you seek to create is the foundation of any transformation effort. Expressing the change you seek in terms of outcomes allows you to build change programs that very specifically target the behaviors you want to promote.

So she sent an email to about 400 key employees, explaining the recent work of her team. The email ended with a simple call to action. Reply to this email if you’re interested in attending a training in this technology.

We want to adopt a new technology? How would we do that? We might work backwards from the outcomes we seek: we want people to feel comfortable with the technology, so we want to offer training.

You try something, see if it works, and if it does, you invest in the approach. This experimental approach to achieving behavior change creates a deeply agile way to approach transformation inside organizations.

What are the new behaviors you want to create in the organization? What will people be doing differently when your change program is successful?

action-oriented approach:

experiment your way forward to make progress.