Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success by Joshua Seiden

Outcomes Over Output is an insightful swift read, for anybody who wants to learn more about what key metrics to use for business success.

 Joshua explains the chain of resources, activities, outputs, outcomes and impact. In my career I did indeed spent most of my time focusing on outputs. Deliver feature X, ship product Y. I had output level goals which led to all the challenges described in the book. Customers not finding the features and products useful enough, because we didn’t experiment and validate our work with enough of them ahead of time. We focused on output (the feature) but not the outcome (customers loving and using our feature every day).

 The book centers around human behaviour. ‘An Outcome is a change in human behaviour that drives business results.’ What is the customer behaviour change we are looking for? In my case I want more active user, user expanding their use of my service, more trial users, more users converting to paid plans, etc. Those are the human behaviours that drive my business results (impact). The book is asking: ‘How can we get people to do more of these behaviours?’ and ‘How do we know that we are right?’.

 Today I am no longer thinking up features in isolation, and being measured on output – but the book did expand my thinking and helped me to explain outcome based planning to my peers and leaders. It does a great job on explaining how measuring those human behaviours, combined with experiments will change the planning of work (activities). We are no longer talking about delivering features but about solving business problems.

Great read for everybody.