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High-performing product teams: Measuring real progress
In the old days of output-driven and project-oriented management, setting goals wasn’t particularly hard. However, in a digital and product-oriented era, being “done” with a product is less obvious and having a comprehensive measurement of innovation is key.
Product organizations must have a useful and usable innovation measurement framework focused on real impact and on the innovation process itself while motivating people to do their best.
Yet, despite decades of solid research and empirical evidence on goal-setting theory, countless organizations and some startups are still measuring the wrong things or — even worst — not measuring anything meaningful at all.
Seeing the big picture before setting objectives
In a corporate environment, the company’s Vision, Mission, Strategy, and Objectives will be fundamental inputs to the Product Vision.
The Product Vision describes the world you are trying to create. Product Strategy is how you make the Product Vision a reality whilst meeting the business needs as you go. To do this successfully, you need Focus — one of the key elements of an effective Product Strategy. You have to make tough choices, whilst acknowledging what you know, what you can’t know, and managing the risk cleverly. Simply put, to consistently generate real impact, you need to choose the single or very few outcomes you want to try to tackle first (or next).
In the Jobs-to-be-Done and Outcome-driven Innovation framework from Tony Ulwick, an outcome is “a metric the customer uses to measure success and value while executing a job”. An example of an outcome statement would be:
According to Josh Seiden, author of Lean UX and Outcome vs Output:
An outcome is a measurable change in behavior that drives business results.
