For great results, focus on inputs and not the output

Every year, we go through the ritual of setting up annual goals, personal and professional. Often, we don’t achieve them. Have you ever wondered why?

We are obsessing about on the wrong thing, the output.

Most of us set goals that look like these:

• Author : Reach an audience of 100,000 users.
• Startup CEO: Grow 200% and get to $5M annual revenue this year.
• Individual: Lose 10kgs of weight.

Goals usually take the shape of quantifiable or otherwise measurable output targets. Once we set the goal, we evaluate it throughout the duration. When we find ourselves deviating from the target, we feel lost or frustrated. What is going wrong ? How should we fix it? Here’s what we need to do differently to reliably achieve our goals.

We need to spend as much and more time on the input.

Going back several thousand years ago, Lord Krishna told Arjun on the battlefield:

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It is a famous sanskrit sholka from the Bhagavad Gita. It means that you are entitled to do your Karma ( your work, your actions or your deeds) but not to the fruits thereof.

What does this have to do with achieving a goal in the 21st century? Let me illustrate with some insights from one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the modern era, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. Jeff is notorious for not running the company on output metrics like revenue, profitability, etc. See this snipped from the 2010 annual letter below.

So, if they don't focus on outputs metrics, what do they focus on ? Well, they obsessed over customers and figured out what they are looking for.

They identified the now famous e-Commerce virtuous loop around value, choice and customer selection that drives customer behaviour.

The idea is that if those input goals are sorted and delivered, the output - aka revenue, profitability, growth, etc. will sort itself out. To put money where their mouth is, everyone in the company, is apparently rewarded on delivering on the “input metrics” and not the “output”.

What the Bhagavad Gita says about life is also true about our yearly goals. Focusing your “karma” on the right inputs will automatically deliver the right output.

Here’s why:

1. Setting input goals helps you understand the levers that drive your output.

In the case of Amazon, ironically, they figured out from the physical world retail over the past century, that customers love low prices, great selection and convenience. If you don’t have the inputs down, you may need to talk to people who understand your personal or business goal; perhaps they have accomplished it earlier or seen others who have. If you are charting brand new territory, you may even need to run a “feedback loop” on a bunch of experimental inputs. One needs to narrow down on the inputs that make sense and discard the ones that don’t.

2. Inputs are controllable AND actionable; outputs are not! 

Outputs depend a lot on inputs, environment, luck, competitive landscape, etc. Inputs depend on you, your team and sheer execution. If for whatever reason, one finds that the inputs are not working to deliver the output, you can go back to the "input selection" process to understand what is going wrong.

This line of Input vs. Output metrics is also highly reflective in other literature; I strongly recommend reading the Goals vs. Habits blog post at Farnam Street.

Input Goal Setting

Lets apply this, say, for an blogger’s goal of becoming a widely read author with a following of a 100,000 readers. Just for the purpose of illustration, here are a few “inputs” :

• Writing regularly
• Improving the quality of writing
• Understanding the audience
• Getting users to “share” their articles
• Getting featured by various platforms which have large distribution
• And more …

Notice that none of them have anything to do with getting “100K users”. Now, with these inputs, the desired actions start looking different. The aspiring author could take a target of writing 2 posts a month, take a 2 day course on business writing or persuasion, understand the “audience” and what makes them share content, etc. They can them measure how they are doing along those metrics

A similar line of thinking will apply even to the startup CEO's goals of tripling revenue. They may want to understand their existing revenue mix by customer segment or cohort. Let’s say this business was doing great at selling into small and mid-market customers but realised that they need to additionally move into the enterprise.

They may want to take an “input” targets such as :

• Harvesting X% more from existing SMB customers
• Cultivate 2 channel partners for larger accounts in 1H; add 6 enterprise accounts in 2H
• Increase the NetPromoter score of 60% to get better referrals.

Similarly, in the case of the personal goal for weight loss, one might identify that one needs to eat a balanced diet, eat 25% lesser per day, do vigorous exercise for 3 hours a week, and sleep for 7 hours a day! Again, focussing on the right inputs will lead to the output!

Abandon the “obsession” with the output. Identify and focus on the input goals.

Get everyone around you with “shared” goals to do the same. As Andy Grove has famously said, you become what you measure. Measure your inputs and set your targets around those. Deliver on those inputs. Not only will you crush the outputs but you will do so more predictably.

(Amit is a Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, an early stage Venture Capital firm based out of Bangalore, India. Prime VP invests in category creating, early stage companies founded by rock star teams. Prior, Amit has held leadership positions at Makemytrip, Google and IBM. He is also deeply engaged with the early stage startup ecosystem in India and actively volunteers with iSpirt, TiE and NASSCOM. Find his other blogs on LinkedIn and tweets here@amitsomani)