Continuous Discovery Habits summary

What’s the difference between an output and an outcome? Knowing the answer might make all the difference to your business. 

Let’s start by taking a look at what an output is. An output is a thing. This thing might be a product, or it might just be a feature of a product. If you ask your product team what their outputs are, they will point to all the great products that are sitting on your business’s shelves, or those products’ features, which they have designed. 

Now let’s look at what an outcome is. A business outcome is not a thing; it’s a change. Maybe it’s a change in your business’s bottom line, or it might be a change in your customers’ behavior, or a change in customer-satisfaction levels. Outcomes are about the impacts that your company’s products have on your customers, or on your business itself. 

Now that we’re clear on the difference between an output and an outcome, let’s ask another question: What should your company be focusing on, outputs or outcomes? 

The answer is always outcomes. When you focus on outcomes over outputs, you put your customer at the heart of your business. Your product team starts by looking at what outcome they would want to achieve for your customers, and then thinks about what products to build or tweak, in order to make those outcomes a reality. This is the way to do things.

When the focus is on outputs, the product team comes up with a concept for a product first and only later thinks about what customer need or desire that product might serve. This is not the way to do things.

Let’s take a look at this difference in action.

Product consultant Teresa Torres worked with a custom-made dog-food company’s product team. This team started by thinking about what outcome they wanted for their customers. They decided that they wanted to improve their customers’ understanding of just how healthy their custom-made dog food was. If more customers realized how good their food was for their dogs, the product team figured that they would keep buying the food, month after month. With this outcome in mind, the product team set about experimenting with methods of improving their customers’ knowledge of their food. They made changes to the way they explained their product to customers, and then measured whether these changes had any impact on how many customers continued to subscribe to their dog-food service. This focus on outcomes, rather than outputs, allowed them to keep their customers’ needs at the heart of their operations.