One of the most common topics I coach junior product design, product management, and general business folks about is the difference between outcomes and outputs. One of my employees recently told me it was one of the most valuable things he'd finally learned all year.
There's a constant pressure to deliver at work. We all often get caught up in a whirlwind of tasks, sprints, and deliverables. However, there's a critical distinction that often gets overlooked but can make or break the success of any project or how you get evaluated come performance review time: the difference between outcomes and outputs. Understanding and prioritizing outcomes over outputs is not just a subtle shift in mindset; it's a fundamental change in how we approach work, measure success, and, ultimately, how we create value.
Early in my career, before working with product managers, projects were primarily handled by project managers and product owners. I had a dedicated and diligent colleague who often stayed late to create additional design assets beyond what was asked, hoping his efforts would be noticed.
One week, our team received a big new e-commerce project. The project manager assigned tasks, including the usual creation of flashy design assets and marketing copy. While my colleague continued to work hard on these outputs, a few of us questioned the underlying purpose of our tasks. We wanted to understand the real problem we were solving and the desired business outcome.
Our inquiry revealed that the project's true objective was to increase conversion rates, not just refresh marketing materials. We analyzed analytics data and identified a key issue: the checkout button blended in too much with the surrounding UI. We ran an A/B test, changing the button's colour to make it stand out. This small change led to a significant increase in conversion rates.
The most striking part? Our efforts to align with the business outcome, analyze the issue, and set up the A/B test took just one day. Meanwhile, our colleague spent the entire week creating assets that didn't address the core problem. As a result, our approach was celebrated, leading to greater responsibilities and earlier involvement in future projects. This experience underscored the importance of focusing on outcomes rather than just outputs.
Outputs are the tangible results of our work. They are the features we build, the reports we generate, and the campaigns we launch.
I worked on that project.
I designed a thing.
I wrote that content.
I checked a box off my to-do list.
I got it done.
In essence, outputs are the what—the deliverables that teams produce. For many organizations, outputs are the default metric for productivity and success. And it makes sense. They generally represent things we can touch, see, and otherwise experience. Many product teams get embroiled in debates over how many features were shipped this quarter or sales teams and how many leads were generated. Lord, do I ever feel for the support teams battling over how many tickets get resolved.
While output metrics provide a sense of progress, they are often misleading. Focusing solely on outputs can lead to what I refer to as a checkbox mentality, where the completion of tasks is valued over the actual impact of those tasks. This can result in teams working tirelessly, like my old pal, yet not moving the needle on the organization's most important goals.
Sadly, this is also often not the fault of the general worker. Many times, no one has brought them into the fold and entrusted them with understanding why we're doing what we're doing and what's actually important to the business, let alone asked them to collaborate on a solution.
A few months after our A/B test boosted conversion rates, our team was hungry for more opportunity. On the flipside, however, we were being forced to execute on Marketing deliverables and production assets. We were clawing our way into becoming an early product team, but we needed more time to dig in on the things we now knew actually mattered to the business, despite its own best efforts to keep things chugging along at a snail's pace.
A week's worth of production work hit my desk.
The same thing that hit us every month at the same time. I stared at the folders on my screen and then announced, "I think I can automate this."
Remember my old pal? He was worried. He thought that if we automated our work away then why would management keep us around? I wasn't worried about that– I wanted bigger, juicier, more interesting problems.
I quickly set about getting Photoshop to record what I had to do into an action set. The only thing I couldn't figure out at the time was how to get past having to manually hit a button every couple of minutes. I took the banana from my lunch, put a sticky note on it asking no one to move it because it was about to be working hard, and left for lunch.
When I came back from lunch, most tasks were completed, and I just had to touch up a few things. Marketing was happy, and all was well. I had completed my week's worth of work in half a day and was now free to dig in on more business-impacting work with our slowly maturing UX pals.
Outcomes are the why behind the work—the impact and value that the outputs deliver. They are changes in customer behaviour, increases in customer satisfaction, growth in market share, achievement of strategic goals, increases in revenue and decreases in expenses. Outcomes are inherently tied to the purpose and intent behind the work. They answer the crucial question: "What difference did this/my work make?"
I try to coach every product person that the better they can get at collecting and reporting on the outcomes their work has and then tying those outcomes back to an effect on revenue or expenses, the better they will intuitively become at their jobs and the more desirable a job candidate they will become.
For example, a new feature release (output) might aim to reduce customer churn (outcome). A successful outcome is not the release itself but the observed reduction in churn rate. And if we wanted to go one step further, we could evaluate how much revenue that reduction in churn rate was worth to us.
Outcomes focus on the real-world effects and benefits of the work, providing a clearer picture of success.
Making the shift from an output-focused to an outcome-focused approach requires a cultural transformation. Here are some strategies to facilitate this shift that I've tried or witnessed work at various organizations:
Simply delivering outputs is not sufficient. Many organizations won't even consider resumes for senior roles unless they reference some type of measurable impact the candidate had at past organizations. The true measure of success lies in the outcomes— the real-world impact of the work. By shifting the focus from outputs to outcomes, businesses can drive meaningful change, deliver greater value to customers, and achieve their strategic objectives. It's time to ask not just "What did we do?" but "Why did we do it?" and "What difference did it make?"
And if you're part of an organization that doesn't get it, but you do? Start with your own banana and work your way up, building trust and tackling bigger opportunities as they come.