Maybe we know that they visit our site after a friend shares an image of one of our shirts on social media.

MVP, this is what I mean: it’s the smallest thing we can do or make to see if our hypothesis is true.

And that’s what hypotheses encourage us to do: to test our assumptions to see if we’re right or wrong.

In other words, they’ve got to break down “increase revenue” into smaller, actionable parts.

This is how we can measure progress by using outcomes: 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?”

To do that they broke the year into quarters, and began holding goal-setting meetings with the executive leadership. The idea was to understand and agree on the top three outcomes executives wanted to get to in the next quarter. “We have annual goals,” Hellweg said, “but we look at them each quarter to find the top three near-term goals.”

Result as a measurable customer behavior, you almost automatically have a well-written OKR.

So how do you set expectations for stakeholders? When are we going to be done? When should we stop working on something? It’s hard to admit that the answer to this question can feel subjective: we stop working on something when we’ve made enough progress to feel satisfied. This means we have to define what result will satisfy us. Maybe we’ve agreed

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?”