Chapter 1: What are Outcomes

Outcome

is a change in human behavior that drives business results. Outcomes have nothing to do with making stuff - though they sometimes are created by making the right stuff. Instead, outcomes are the changes customer, user, employee behavior that lead to good things for your company, your organization, or whomever is the focus of your work.

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.

Takeaways:

• You can manage a team by telling them what to make: that’s called managing outputs. It’s a problem because features don’t always deliver value.
• You can manage a team by asking them to target some high-level value, like growing revenue. That’s called managing impact. It’s a problem because it’s not specific enough.
• 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 ke- eps them focused on delivering value.
• For our purposes, an outcome is a “change in human behavior that drives business results.”
• Defining outcomes in terms of human behaviors creates a more customer-centric and user-centric ways of working
• Outcomes and Agility: using outcomes to direct the work of your teams unlocks your team’s creativity. They will work to find the best solution to the problem at hand in order to create the outcome you seek
• To figure out if your outputs create the outcomes you seek, you need to test and run experiments. MVP is just a buzzword that means “experiment”

Chapter 2: Using Outcomes

Only 5 things executives care about

• increasing revenues
• decreasing costs
• increasing new business and market share
• increasing revenue from exist customers
• increasing shareholder value

Magic questions for finding outcomes

• What are the user and customer behaviors that driver 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.)

Takeaways:

• Don’t mistake impact - high-level aspirational goals - for outcomes. Impact is important, but it’s too big for any one group to target.
• Use the magic questions to define outcomes.
• Remember that by “humans” we mean customers, users, employees, stakeholders, or anyone involved in the system that we’re building
• When you’re planning work, be clear about your assumptions. Be prepared to test your assumptions by expressing work as hypotheses. Test your hypotheses continuously by working in small iterations, experimenting, and responding to the data and feedback you collect.
• Use outcomes to track progress. Leading indicators tell you that you’re going to hit or miss your target. Lagging indicators show your target. Build an understanding of wha behaviors lead to achieving the targets you seek.
• Use outcomes (not features) to plan initiatives. Ask “what new behaviors will this initiative create that will deliver business value? How can we deliver that value sooner?”
• OKRs can be improved if you think of the Key Result as an outcome.

Chapter 3: Outcomes-based planning

Customer Journey Map: A diagram that read left to right and describes what people are doing (“their journey”) when they interact with your product or service

Boosters: What behaviors at each step predict success and satisfaction?

Blockers: What behaviors at each step predict failure and dissatisfaction?

Takeaways:

• Planning with outputs limits teams’ agility and problem-solving flexibility. Increase teams’ capabilities here by planning around outcomes.
• Create outcome-based roadmaps that list questions, themes, and outcomes instead of features
• One way to find outcomes is to create Customer Journey Maps. These map help visualize how systems work in terms of customer (and employe) behavior, and so can help you find important outcomes in the system

Chapter 4: Specifying Outcomes

Value is realized not when a feature is delivered, but only when people use it

Chapter 5: Organizing for Outcomes

In outcome-based work, teams need to be really clear about the value they are trying to create; and they do this by specifying two critical outcomes of the work: 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. In other words, you have to have theory that if you create a certain outcome for the customer, this will result in a specific outcome for the business:

If we create this outcome for the user, it will deliver this outcome for the business.

Chapter 6: Outcomes for Transformation

Outcomes-based thinking is, in fact, the key to transformation.

• Three rules to keep in mind:
  • Your colleagues are your customers
  • What happens if we think of these leaders as our customers?
  • What mix of policy and action could we put in place to get them aligned?
• What change in behavior on the part of the leaders could we observe to see if we’ve succeeded?
• Everything is an outcome
• Everything is an experiment

Takeaways:

• When considering organizational change, take a customer-centric approach with your colleagues. What are their goals? What value can you offer to them in order to get them to “buy” the change you are selling?
• Frame organizational change initiatives in terms of outcomes. What are the new behaviors you want to create in the organization? What will people be doing differently when your change program is successful?
• Changing people’s behavior is hard, and not easy to predict or plan on paper. Instead, take an action-oriented approach: experiment your way forward to make progress.

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www.joshuaseiden.com