Outcomes Over Output Quotes

“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.”
― Josh Seiden, Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success

“mistaking “making stuff” for making progress, and mistaking shipping features for being done.”
― Josh Seiden, Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success

“In most situations, initiatives are not planned in terms of outcomes. Instead, they’re much more likely to be planned and tracked in terms of features built, or in terms of how they’re tracking to some promised delivery date or other milestone. For leaders in this situation, there’s a simple question that they can use to start the conversation about outcomes: “ what (user/customer/employee) behaviors has this initiative created that are driving business results?” That question is the key to tracking progress because it moves the conversation away from features and reorients it towards value delivery.”
― Josh Seiden, Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success

“These questions are my magic questions for finding outcomes. 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.)”
― Josh Seiden, Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success