Outcomes Over Output

It’s a simple idea: you make a diagram that reads from left to right and describes what people are doing (their “journey”) when they interact with your product or service. So, for example,

honestly assessing what you do know and what you don’t know, then use observations of customer behavior, data about what people do, and experiments to expand the scope of what you actually know.

insist that our teams plan in terms of outcomes, then ask repeatedly: “what new behaviors did your work create that are creating value for the business?”

One challenge is that customer return rate is a lagging indicator. It tells you how often your customers have visited you in the past, but it has limited predictive power. It can’t tell you what you should do in order to increase the rate of customer visits. For that, you need to identify your leading indicators.

We can express our assumptions as part of an hypothesis, and we can run an experiment in order to test our hypothesis and see whether our assumptions are right or wrong.

What you want is to manage with outcomes: ask teams to create a specific customer behavior that drives business results. That allows them to find the right solution, and keeps them focused on delivering value.

both observable and measurable. This

For our purposes, we’re going to be strict about this definition: an outcome is “a change in human behavior that drives business results.”

we want to use a planning process that makes it possible to make as little stuff as possible and still achieve the outcome we seek.