Outcomes over Outputs

If you take one thing away from Melissa Perri’s book, Escaping the Build Trap, it’s that if you want to maximize business and customer value, you must focus on outcomes over outputs.

Melissa Peri: https://melissaperri.com/book

However, many organizations have a very top-down structure that focuses on a list of features that get pushed down to development teams. 

Product Heartbeat: https://www.instagram.com/productheartbeat/

Product-led Organizations

The solution is to shift to a product-led organization that focuses on outcomes over outputs by encouraging experimentation, learning, and small iterative steps of delivery that then lead to additional learning. 

“The product-lead organization is characterized by a culture that understands and organizes around outcomes over outputs, including a company cadence that revolved around evaluating its strategy in accordance to meeting outcomes. In product-lead organizations, people are rewarded for learning and achieving goals. Management encourages product teams to get close to their customers, and product management is seen as a critical function that furthers the business.” - Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap

This is an incredibly powerful and concise explanation around what management is and the promise of what it can deliver, if done well. But that’s the hard part: doing product management well. Escaping the Build Trap offers a great framework to connect vision and strategic intents to outcomes through exploration and experimentation: The Product Kata. 

Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Peri: https://melissaperri.com/book

Strategic Intents

It took me a while to really digest the Product Kata. What helped me was connecting Strategic Intents to a goal setting framework I’m already more familiar with: OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Ultimately, a company’s strategic intent consist of an intent (or objective) along with one or many goals (key results). This defines the outcome that the company is seeking to achieve its vision. 

Product Initiatives

Once the intents are set, the product organization can define intents that I’ve come to think about as bets. They usually start with the phrase “we believe that by…” and consist of a measurable target that hones in on an aspect of the original intent. It’s good to think about these as bets since at this stage, this is still a hypothesis. Further exploration is required before the solution (output) is known. 

Problem and Solution Exploration

Defining the baseline data from which you will benchmark your learning and performance is arguably the hardest steps. The best advice is to start with whatever data you have on hand and iterate towards new data sources to enhance your learning. Even if you have little to start with, when you run experiments they should be structured to produce data. Is you continue executing against the kata, your data warehouse will naturally grow over time. 

“The best solutions are linked to problems that users what solved… use a process to identify which of those problems the team can solve to further the business and achieve the strategy. Develop the right experimental mindset to fall in love with the problem rather than the solution.” - Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap

The Flywheel

The transformation to a product-lead organization does not happen over night. It will take steady and disciplined effort over time to achieve momentum but once you have it, you will feel it. I am reminded of Jim Collin’s Flywheel concept. 

“The flywheel, when properly conceived and executed, creates both continuity and change. On the one hand, you need to stay with a flywheel long enough to get its full compounding effect. On the other hand, to keep the flywheel spinning, you need to continually renew, and improve each and every component.” - Jim Collins, Turning the Flywheel

If you’re hungry for deeper insight into how you can achieve product-lead momentum, you should certainly pick up Melissa Perri’s Escaping the Build Trap. Think of it as your next push on the Flywheel. 

Jim Collins: https://www.jimcollins.com/books/turning-the-flywheel.html