Scaling Coherent Outcomes

Learning to work with outcomes and see the whole picture is tough, especially if you’re used to being in the details of execution.

I remember the first time I worked on an empowered product team and had to shift my focus from outputs to outcomes. It felt like trying to swim in the ocean. I was used to being in the weeds, planning hyper-specific details and executing to spec. But suddenly, I had to decide the right direction to swim when it all looked like the same water. I wasn’t practiced thinking about how my work fit into the bigger picture or what my part of achieving it was. It was a tough transition full of uncertainty and anxiety.

Honing your outcome-centricity will make you better at focusing on what's essential but it’s still an uncomfortable, foreign mindset to learn. It's no surprise many companies stumble to operate in an outcome-oriented way. Changing how one person thinks and works is not easy let alone an entire organization with layers and layers of competing assumptions, goals, and priorities. The key is to define outcomes so they form a coherent linkage connecting business needs to customer value that make sense across multiple levels.

It’s rare that one outcome is enough to realize full value for customer value to business result. Coherent, aligned outcomes help everyone see the big picture, where they fit in, and what the intention behind work is. Outcomes exist at every level of empowerment, each with its own risks and success measures, leverage points, and decision tradeoffs. Becoming an outcome-oriented company requires developing people’s ability to see the picture of connecting inputs and influencers between levels, and a ruthless organizational focus on proving success based on that picture.

In my experience, outcome roadmaps are a good place to spot gaps in thinking. They often reveal how fluent the company is in supporting outcomes and what type of assumptions are being made. Unlike outputs, which are managed with release plans and gantt charts that define the solution to build and work to be done, outcome roadmaps focus on the result of work and de-emphasize the actual solution. 

If you are looking at roadmaps full of solutions and tactics that’s an indication outcome-mindsets are only surface level. So what can you do?

Towards Coherence

I recently read John Cutler’s concept of coherent levels of empowerment and it gave me a fresh perspective. In his post, he argues that all levels within an organization must work in concert, with a clear understanding of how one’s responsibilities impact others.

Creating coherent outcomes follows a similar pattern. Success or failure at one level affects the levels above and below. Clear connections between these levels are crucial. 

Here’s how I see it:

Unless teams can measure the impact of success (or failure) of their work on other levels they are not truly empowered to take appropriate action. And building more – AKA more outputs – is only one option out of many. For example, if the success of an initiative (outcomes closer to customer value) stalls, this is a signal to re-evaluate the goal and consider trade-offs. Conversely, if a product team’s North Star metrics look good but the lagging indicators show no movement on business value, it could mean you’re not focusing on the right leverage points or need to rethink how you’re defining success.

1. Top Level (Closer to Value): This is where value is delivered and outcomes speak to direct user value. Key documents include release plans, product one-pagers, experiment docs, and backlogs. In isolation these outcomes easily become solutions in disguise; they’re actionable and important to customers, but not useful for building viable products.

2. Middle Level (Problems to Solve): Focuses on validated problems. Outcomes here might center on enabling success and reducing uncertainty. Roadmaps and data dashboards are essential tools.  

3. Bottom Level (Closer to Business Results): The most open-ended level. It includes measurable objectives that inform problem discovery and hypothesize leading indicators to move KPIs. Think business objectives and shared goals (e.g., OKRs, OGSMs). In isolation these are too vague to lead to coherent action or solving user problems.

Understanding Coherency

A simple reason people struggle with outcomes is that outputs feel more certain because tracking effort is easier to manage. With outcomes, no amount of work guarantees success. It’s uncomfortable and you have to admit you’re wrong a lot. Coherency of outcomes across your value chain will never remove all uncertainty and discomfort, but it helps create confidence that the right things are being built. 

Common Pitfalls

People often make the mistake of focusing too narrowly on the extremes. They either zoom in on the lower level outcome, aiming at the big-dollar goals packed with assumptions, or they fixate on the topmost level, which is the safest and least uncertain and lends itself most to output-oriented flow. Incoherent outcomes usually fall into one of two traps:

1. Overly Specific Outcomes (solutions in disguise)
   These are defined by people or teams close to the work being done or with a specific solution already in mind. Focusing too narrowly on the work to be done can lead to wasted effort that fails to achieve the intent. For example, A team migrating virtual machine provisioning to cut costs might see their outcome as implementing switching infrastructure. The most likely result is migration succeeds, business results flop. But you’d never know that. Other symptoms this creates include:

   1. Less Valuable Products: The delivered work does not solve the problem in the most valuable or viable way.

   2. More Costly Development: The actual work completed lacks problem-solution fit, and the cost of delivering the work far exceeds the value it generates.

   3. Closed-mindedness: When teams are focused on implementation, they sometimes artificially constrain their thinking and miss other ideas and opportunities to make their work more valuable.
      
      

2. Vague Outcomes
   Lofty, unachievable goals like "increase revenue by $500M" create confusion and lack accountability. Goals that are too vague prevents teams from connecting work to intent, leading to misalignment and inefficiency. I’ve also seen other interesting knock-on effects: 

   1. No Accountability:  In these cases there is usually no way to prove or disprove what work actually contributes. It’s comfortable to assume work equals value, but it’s not viable. IMO, this is also a key place productivity and output become proxy success metrics because there’s not enough instrumentation around the outcomes.

   2. Confusion and Misalignment: If the goal is $500M, are all teams measuring revenue increase based on order revenue or fulfilled sales? Is this incremental sales? Channel specific sales or from a specific customer group? Without defining more specific outcomes for each team, disagreement on what data matters blocks evidence-based decision making.

Companies that are good at bringing coherence to outcomes are better at acknowledging the many layers and defining the value at each. More layers doesn’t make mapping impossible but the more organizational complexity exists, the more levels and sub-outcomes there are likely to be. Understanding these challenges highlights the importance of a balanced approach to defining outcomes. 

To wrap it up, first find an important outcome your team can realistically achieve, then figure out how your success influences outcomes above and below you, and finally track your progress and product’s influence up and down. Coherent outcomes in organizations require attention to intermediate outcome levels and dedication to understanding their systemic impacts. In addition to empowerment, coherency leads to greater accountability, more valuable work, and better alignment with customer needs and business results.