How to create good product outcomes
The top 3 lessons I've learned
It is harder to create good product outcomes than you think.
I moved my team at User Interviews to this model over a year ago as we really started to scale. I found a lot of great content about why you should organize around outcomes but not nearly as much about how to do it well.
I learned this the hard way by making some mistakes. Here are the top three lessons I’ve learned.
Avoid broad outcomes
One outcome per team
Keep metrics simple
Avoid broad outcomes
Broad outcomes are a trap. They don't communicate strategy. Teams will come up with ideas within the outcome that aren't aligned with the strategic vision and there will be conflict. Better to miss narrow and let the team challenge the constraints.
Example
I learned this one quarter by setting a broad goal for a team around active users. On the surface, this is a good outcome. It isn’t laggy. There are a lot of ways to influence it. You can connect it to higher level business goals.
The challenge was that I had strong opinions around which users were most important to activate and which actions we most wanted them to complete. These opinions were not reflected in the outcome. A sharper outcome would have narrowed in on a specific cohort of users completing specific actions.
This can feel like you’re constraining the team… because you are. But it is an enabling constraint. When you do this well, the team has more focus and can move faster.
The risk of being too specific is also low because if you have a strong team then they will pushback as they wrestle with the constraints. You can always revise the outcome.
One outcome per team
I know this sounds obvious (and it is). But it is easy to outsmart yourself and think "these goals are closely related so it is okay for the team to juggle both." You're ignoring your responsibility as a leader. Decide which is the priority.
Example
In my case, we had two outcomes that were tightly coupled. We had improvements we needed to make on our Research Hub product. We also had improvements to make around our experience for large teams. It was sort of a Venn diagram. A lot of the feedback from users on large teams was about Research Hub. Win, win – right??
Nope.
It turns out I still needed to prioritize. I set an outcome for each need and assigned both to a team for the quarter. Guess what happened? The team encountered the same difficulty that I had. Which one is more important?
Make the decision on which outcome is the priority and ask the team to focus on that. You can share the context that there are related areas to keep in mind but don’t explicitly task them with improving both.
Keep metrics simple
Complex metrics can be useful. But what you gain in accuracy, you lose in communication and collaboration. They are hard for others to understand and therefore limit contributions. Rally folks around a simpler metric and use complex metrics within the team.
Example
In our Recruit product, the basic flow has two key statuses:
Find participants that match researchers needs (qualified)
Researchers select which participants to move forward (approved)
I believed we could help researchers approve more participants. There was broad agreement this was a good outcome to focus on. The challenge was that approvals are heavily dependent on the pool of qualified participants that have been sourced.
We got a little too clever trying to control for this dynamic. We created a “qualified threshold” metric that then we worked into another metric. And so on.
The team itself did a great job digging into this compound metric and understanding it. But it was challenging to communicate internally to the rest of the business and other stakeholders.
I found myself wishing we had skewed simpler for the outcome and used the more sophisticated approaches within the team.
Closing thought
It is hard to give a ton of context on these examples while keeping this (somewhat) succinct. If you have questions or would like to learn more, drop a comment below and I will follow up! I really enjoy talking about this stuff and I’d love to connect with other product folks to chat about it further.
– JH ✌️
PS – I’m hiring! We have an open role for a Senior Product Designer and a Product Manager. We even made a brief video so you can get to know the team and what we are all about before taking the time to apply.