...
| Info |
|---|
An outcome is a measurable change in customer user behavior. |
The goal of any feature you ship to a customer user should be to change the customer’s user’s behavior in a measurable and positive way.
Customer User behavior <A> changes from <x> to <y> over timeframe <t>.
...
connect to the business outcome
connect to the human behavioral change, and to a moment in time of the customer’s user’s journey
must be a metric that the team is able to move on their own
are negotiated with the leader - are they aggressive enough?
...
Many software teams struggle to deliver value to customersusers. More often than not, it’s because:
product and engineering teams stopped talking to customersusers
they don’t measure whether what they delivered (features) had the desired impact
don’t measure at all
measure the wrong thing
...
Shipping a feature does not equal success. Changing customers’ users’ behavior in measurable and positive ways is what leads to success.
...
To foster an outcomes-based flow of value, teams need to move away from thinking about delivering projects, to instead having long-term customeruser-centric:
ownership of a product or
support of a platform as a service.
...
By emphasizing the prioritization of problems instead of the prioritization of technical solutions, teams can focus energy on continual learning of the customer’s user’s problem space. This shift in mindset from delivering solutions to solving problems enables the team to discover customersusers' needs, desires, and delights, which can also evolve over time.
This is different from a solutions-first approach, where a solution is chosen before fully understanding the problem space, and then pushed to be adopted by customersusers.
🚫 Anti-pattern: Metrics that don’t connect to business outcomes
...
Feature metrics: Performance of a feature (How many people are using it? Is it quicker or easier for a customer user to do X now than it was before?)
Product metrics: Performance of specific product objectives (Because of feature X, more people are using functionality Y)
Team metrics: How many story points/features were launched at the end of the month/quarter? (This will only lead to — at best — success theatre, and at worse, the wrong behaviors from all parties)
A more business-centric way to build and manage a product is by measuring our efforts in terms of outcomes, not output. When we measure outcomes, we measure the impact the new features had on the activity of the users AND the success of the company.
...
Continuous Learning &
...
User-centricity
...
& User-first
Using data that is regularly gathered from customersusers, we build customer user insights, which inform our hypotheses. Being customeruser-first, we ask questions and actively listen in order to form hypotheses, without making assumptions and jumping to conclusions/solutions on behalf of our customersusers. Being customeruser-centric, we keep the voice and perspective of the customer user in mind as we prioritize, design, develop, validate → and continuously learn and iterate.
Opportunity trees and Product Katas (see below) are tools to enable continuous learning and refining of the customeruser-problem space. We continue to discover opportunities through regular customer user touchpoints.
To ensure customeruser-centricity, opportunities are phrased from the customer’s user’s point of view. Tie the opportunity to a specific moment in time.
| Info |
|---|
Opportunities = customer user needs, customer user pain points, customer user desires, or customer user questions, at a moment in time. |
...
🔍 DISCOVER: Developer Journey Map
Starting with the customer user journey gives a high-level understanding of our customer’s user’s needs and a customeruser-centric perspective of the high-level touchpoints with the products and services that we provide.
...
Visualizes the team’s mental model of the problem space
Promotes the idea of many bets or multi-tracking towards the business outcome
Binds solutions in groupings (opportunities) that are themed, contextual and most importantly, aligned to the outcome
The trees can also be used in reverse; if you have a lot of ideas (or a backlog you’ve just taken over), you can work backward to the outcome and discard ideas that don’t align
Allows measuring at many levels — business outcome, opportunities, solutions, experiments
Ensures opportunities are exposed through generative research (like the Kata Table)
Note: we need to find a standard way to link opportunities to customer user insights.
Arch example (link)
...
“The process is about progressively solving problems, identifying the next step, and expanding understanding. Once there is sufficient understanding to anchor knowledge and take the next step, do so. Step and repeat. This framework will deepen your customer user knowledge and expose a host of opportunities and solutions to impact the business objective.” [reference]
...
Provide a concise way to externalize the team’s roadmap. Rather than focusing on the date of delivery, include the following:
Columns: Places in the Customer User Journey
Rows: Recent, Now, Next, Future
...