Outcomes vs Outputs: A Key Mindset Shift for High-Performing Product Organizations
An important characteristic of high-performing product organizations is the company-wide ability to focus on outcomes over outputs. It sounds straightforward, but a surprising number of teams (and leaders) get distracted by outputs—like how many features were built, or whether time on page increased—rather than keeping the bigger picture in focus. Now, I’m not saying outputs aren’t important, but they lack the context and detail required to build the right things. This article will help you understand the importance of focusing on outcomes over outputs, with some initial steps and “watch outs” to follow as you cultivate this mindset.
What are Outcomes? What are Outputs?
In simple terms, outputs are the things you accomplish/complete/build to help achieve the outcomes.
Outcomes, therefore, are the results of those accomplishments on the organization (and your key targets, or areas you aimed to impact).
Why Teams and Leaders Should Focus on Outcomes Over Outputs
Focusing on outcomes over outputs is essential because it ensures the product you build delivers tangible value and solves real problems for key communities, and in support of organizational goals.
When you have an outcome mindset, it shifts the focus to the bigger picture. Did we fix something that was causing friction for a user? Did we deliver something new to solve an emerging customer problem? Did we increase market share by X% for a specific priority segment in XX months?
In other words, focusing on outcomes doesn’t simply tell you whether or not you’ve built something; it tells you if you’ve built the right thing based on its measurable impact.
How to Cultivate an Outcome-Focused Mindset
This mindset is a fundamental part of a modern product operating model and it starts with the C-suite’s ability to write a strategy that’s articulated in terms of outcomes (with plenty of context). When you do this right, it empowers your teams to build the right things that will achieve the outcomes you desire.
For example, let’s say your current strategy says something along the lines of “Grow users by X%.” That’s a pretty common statement, but it’s nowhere near specific enough. If it was really just about growth, you could hire a bot farm to get you 2M new followers by Tuesday. But that’s probably not what you actually want, is it? You probably want to evangelize your users and grow a larger base of loyalists who are primed to engage and convert.
That’s why context is so important when you’re setting strategy at the top of the house. Being clear about desired outcomes will help the rest of the organization contemplate how they’ll align with your vision when they take the strategy back to their corners of the universe. Rather than telling them what to do, you’re telling them what you hope to achieve so that they can build the right things to get you there.
Let’s try some outcome-forward goal setting together. Rather than the generic “Achieve X% in revenue”, you could specify as follows: “Increase an additional 5M in revenue over 6 months with primary market segments through strategic retail partnership in North America and Europe.”
Here, you’re using outcome-based language and giving context around money, time, location, and audience. Because it’s not simply that you want to make more money; it’s how you want to make money, which markets you want to serve, which segments you want to grow, which customers you want to increase their basket size, etc.
With this context in hand, your teams can focus on the how (which outputs to build/create/perform). This is what gets the whole org swimming in the same direction.
Next Steps
To get started, my advice is to pull out your top-order company strategy (or departmental or divisional strategy), and do an audit. Look through the document line by line to see if you’ve contextualized the outputs by defining the outcomes, or if you’re simply leading with outputs.
This might be an oversimplification, but one easy way you can tell if you’re leading with outputs is by evaluating the verbs you’re using.
Outcome-oriented language tends to leverage measurement verbs, such as:
Increase/decrease
Improve/Eliminate
Grow/Reduce
Output-oriented verbs are more binary—you either have or haven’t done them—so there isn’t a a degree to it, for example:
Create
Build
Perform
Activate
After you reevaluate your existing strategy and make changes you can start communicating outcomes to your teams more broadly, providing the necessary context to help them succeed.
In Conclusion
Thinking in terms of outcomes will help your teams better understand the big picture and define exactly which outputs they need to build to land the vision. As a leader, the more you can narrow in on what you want, the more your people will know how to prioritize what’s important. This is essential to making sure your organization isn’t just building things, but that you’re building the right things that will have the biggest impact on your customer and organizational goals.
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