Are you shipping outputs or outcomes? What's the advantage of one over the other, and how do you effectively do one over the other? In this epsiode, we talk about these distinctions and compare it to delivering chocolate cake. Because who doesn't like cake?
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Below are your cliff notes:
Outcomes are about delivering the right results to your customers. These are measurable.
Delivering outcomes means tracking, before and after you ship, whether or not you accomplished the outcome you set out to. For example: a 15% reduction in time it takes to do task X.
Shipping outputs is like being a feature factory. It's check-the-box and move on.
Shipping outputs is like building a house on sand. Unless you're lucky, it is going to catch up to you and you will have a lot of adjusting to do because you've been optimizing toward the wrong thing - delivering SOMETHING instead of the RIGHT thing.
My favorite cake is red velvet. But we talk about chocolate cake. Not as much as we should have, though. I'll fix that next episode.
Outcomes means making sure you ACCOMPLISH the outcome before moving on to the next thing. It's optimizing toward RESULTS and the best product.
How do you know if you're shipping outcomes? Ask someone on your team whether they know what success for your product means. Revenue is an incorrect answer (that's the result of the right outcome being hit).
Outcomes tend to be customer focused. Outputs tend to be product/internal focused.
Thanks for listening to my podcast! I'm a technology entrepreneur and have been involved in numerous startups. Most recently, I am a co-founder of nCino where I lead product innovation, and our AI & ML products, among other things.
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Copyright Nathan Snell 2020. All rights reserved.
