What matters most for Product Mindset: Outcome Vs Output
Product Development has come a long way from Waterfall to Agile. Every week or 2 weeks based on the sprint cycle new features get released.
What should one care about? Should it be the output or the outcome of the features that are released?
The answer would be the same whether you ask an Engineer, Management, or Product Team.
All features should adhere to what customer wants
For a successful product, the focus point should not be the number of features released per sprint cycle but rather the outcome or the changes each feature will attain towards a positive customer experience.
But, How to achieve the outcome satisfying both the business and customer needs?
Focusing on outcome involves not just the end result but understanding each customer segment and their journey.
Step 1: Welcome Process Change & Be more Proactive
- Start measuring the OKRs instead of the number of L2’s (features) released
- Welcome changes with periodic experimentation to find the optimal solution
- Foster Transparent Communication Flow between customers, business, product team, and engineers
Step 2: Understand Customer Journey
- Be your own customer of your product
- Understand bottlenecks and the solutions to ease the pain point
- Recurrent customer forums to meet and gather customer feedback
Step 3: Fuel the innovative engine with Data
- Data is the brainpower needed to adapt to the constant changes needed to build a successful product
- Build predictability engine to understand different customer segments and expand customer base
- Enrich product with data insights visualizing the return on investment of various features
Step 4: Trust & Willingness to Change
- Bringing everyone on board involves trust and willingness to change
- Be relevant by reinventing your product to the ever-growing changes
Follow this space for more product management tidbits!!!
