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by adrianmsmith 1354 days ago
> It no longer has remnants of output thinking and firmly underlined the importance of outcome thinking.

As far as I can see the article doesn't define these terms. Does anyone know what they mean in this context? Aren't "output" and "outcome" just two words for the same thing within the context of a software project to implement a feature or make a change?
1 comments
DistrictFun7572 1353 days ago
I'm not 100% sure but isn't it about focusing more on customer value instead of churning out features no one uses? So in summary:

- Output: what you produce, the features, bugfixes, documentation whatever

- Outcome: the actual value for the stakeholders. You could build one hugely important feature which would make the stakeholders love you but the output is still just 1.

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mathewsanders 1353 days ago
Exactly. And outcome for many companies typically boils down to either an increase in revenue, or an increase in cost savings - but normally we use proxies for measuring those (like number of new sign ups, or decrease in churn, increase in CSAT etc).

It astounds me how many companies I’ve witnessed that loose sight of this and end up building feature after feature without even knowing if it’s having a positive (or negative!) impact.

I really like this approach, but a challenge I’ve encountered is successfully trying to measure that outcome and attribute it to the changes (outputs) that your team is making- either because their might be some lead time between output and outcome, or because you’re in a large organization with so many other teams making changes that might also be impacting the outcome you’re aiming to achieve.

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