Review : I came across this book on Linkedin. A short practical book (66 pages) with no fluff and to the point. You can finish it well within an hour. The core idea is about the difference/discrepancy between the output of a product team and the business outcome generated.
There’s a saying that goes “Ship early, ship often”. When we think too much about shipping, we start to lose sight of the impact of that output.
The problem with outputs is that features don’t always deliver value. And when you aim for high-level stuff / goals like grow revenue, it’s too abstract for the team to execute well. Outcomes are things people do, they’re both observable and measurable. It allows us to use it as a management tool to set a smaller and more manageable target that will create the impact we want.
However, outcomes, outputs and inputs are equally important. They aren’t operating independently from one another, we should look at them as a system – how these three pillars connect and work together.
Overall, this book only scratches the surface of the outcome driven approach, still a good read tho.
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Highlights / Quotes / Takeaways :
An outcome is a change in human behaviour that drives business results.
Outcomes Over Output by Josh Seiden
If this sounds to you like I’m saying we should have been more agile, you’re right. But here’s the funny thing: that team was an “agile team”. We had standups and stories and even an agile coach. We thought we were doing it right. But we were focused on the wrong thing: we were focused on what we were making – our output – which would be a big, beautiful app. […] We should have been focused on something else: creating outcomes by changing customer behaviour.
Outcomes Over Output by Josh Seiden
If an outcome is a change in customer behaviour that drives business results, we could have asked, “What is the customer behaviour change that we are looking for?”
Outcomes Over Output by Josh Seiden
You can think of agile projects as a series of hypothese and experiments, all designed o achieve an outcome
Outcomes Over Output by Josh Seiden
An MVP is not version 1.0 of your product. Instead, think of MVP as the smallest thing you can do or the smallest thing you can make to learn if your hypothesis is correct.
Outcomes Over Output by Josh Seiden
MVP is just a buzzword that means “experiement”.
Our indicators are the customer behaviours that drive business results we’re seeking.
Outcomes Over Output by Josh Seiden
Think of the Key Result [in OKR] as an outcome.
Outcomes Over Output by Josh Seiden
Changing people’s behaviour is hard, and not easy to predict or plan on paper. Instead, taken an action-oriented approach: experiment your way forward to make progress.
Outcomes Over Output by Josh Seiden
The Magic Questions
• What are the user and customer behaviours that drive business results?
• How can we get people to do more of those behaviours?
→ orients your planning process away from features and towards behavioural change
• How do we know that we’re right?
→ uncovers the dynamics of the system, the tests & metrics used to measure progress
Outcomes-based roadmaps
• One way to find outcomes is to create Customer Journey Maps
• It helps visualise how systems work in terms of customer behaviour, so as to help find important outcomes in the system
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Suggested Reading
Methods for Identifying Outcomes
• Outcomes Mapping
• Impact Mapping
• Kellogg Foundation Logic Model
• North Start Metric
Further Reading
• Outcome-based Service Mapping
• How to Talk About Nonprofit Impact from Inputs to Outcomes
• How Nonprofits Can Measure Outcomes and Why They Should
• Outcomes over Features: The Fifth Agile Value?
• Outcome-driven Roadmaps
(book)
• Lean Enterprise: How High-Performance Organisation Innovate at Scale
• Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
(video)
• UX Strategy Means Business
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