Connecting Goals, Impacts, Outcomes, and Features

Have you ever found yourself in a meeting where everyone was making good points but at the same time there didn’t seem to be a connection between what everyone was saying? It’s like watching a soccer match with your friends and one says, “They should be more active. They should pass the ball around more.” The other one replies, “No, we need more shots at the goal. How are we supposed to score if we don’t even try?” A third one points out that to win the cup, we need more points than the other teams, and a fourth one remarks that they have lost the interest of the audience. All valid remarks and seemingly unconnected.

Being Product Owners, we often find ourselves acting as translators. We’re trying to translate the language of the developers to the language of the business, and vice versa, as if we were the fabled Babel fish from the classic cult novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

It is likely that a group of people in your company, such as executives and leaders, mostly talk about the company goals to be achieved. Company goals are often expressed in terms of market share, revenue, margin, costs, cash flow, or risk exposure, for example.

Other groups of people, from marketing, sales, customer support, or operations, for example, might be focused more on measurable results that affect the way the company is run. They seek to improve the company impacts, which include examples such as customer satisfaction, the number of new customers, retention of customers, incidents, and product usage.

Then we have our customers and users, who want to get their problems and pains resolved, satisfy their needs, and/or complete jobs and activities in better ways. These customer groups, perhaps being reflected as personas, seek to achieve certain customer outcomes.

And of course, the people who are involved in product development are typically focused on more hands-on stuff, like the roadmap, next steps, goals and objectives, and the next features to build.

Taking the stance of a Customer Representative Product Owner, you will often find yourself in the middle of all these different stakeholders and their perspectives. You will be thinking about how you can better impact the lives of your customers and perhaps how you might make them change their behavior to deliver value for both them and the other stakeholders. Figure 7.1 illustrates how you connect the needs of your organization and stakeholders (goal, impacts) with your target audiences (personas), their desired outcomes, and potential features to develop.

Imagine that the company’s goal is to increase revenues by 20%. Quite an ambitious goal, for sure, but let’s say that it is possible given the current market conditions, growth ambitions, and relative positioning.

There are at least two ways to achieve that company goal. One way is to simply get more subscribers, that is, get new product customers. In this example, let’s say that we believe we can achieve 15% of the revenue goal by attracting more subscribers and 5% by reducing the churn rate of existing subscribers.

Note our use of the words impacts and outcomes here. There is no fixed definition of when to use impact and when to use outcome. Our convention is to use the term company impact when we are talking about measurable results for the company, and the term customer outcomes when we are talking about a measurable change in customer behavior.¹ We’ve seen these words used with various meanings and in various contexts, so it is good advice to communicate what they mean in your organization to avoid confusion.

1. This is in line with the Lean UX method.

Company impacts are ultimately a result of changes in customer behavior. In the World News case study, we focus on the two personas explored in Chapter 6, “Identifying and Expressing Customer Value,” Kate and Jane. The third persona in the example, Xavi, is a persona for an existing print subscriber. We haven’t shared the persona canvas for Xavi in this book, as we believe that having more examples doesn’t add much value to the context. But it is important to keep other personas like Xavi in mind, as we don’t want to lose our existing newspaper customers.

Going back to our user personas, we can find what they consider to be valuable and get an idea of how we could measure if that is the case. So, the next step is to connect your personas to the customer outcomes they seek to achieve.

Kate, for example, doesn’t like it when apps are not self-explanatory. We can see if we are meeting her needs if she starts moving more swiftly through the app and spends more time consuming content. Jane on the other hand is more concerned with cost. Measuring how new signups are divided over the different plans and pricing schemes will tell us if they like our offering.

Where some behaviors amplify each other, others will have a negative effect. For example, more pricing tiers or a combination of ad-driven and premium versions may appeal to Jane. However, it might make the proposition more complicated for Kate. It’s a game of balance.

Note that we haven’t talked about the features yet. Features are a result of the change in behavior that you try to trigger in your personas. Just as with the customer outcomes, features can also influence each other, though that is typically a technical limitation that teams can overcome.

The purpose of a diagram, like the one created for World News, is to facilitate communication and create transparency. You can use it to explain to people how their (company, department, or personal) goals are achieved through a change in customer behavior. Following that you can connect the desired change to the work that we are doing. It is also a great tool to connect technologically oriented people with business-oriented people. It helps to explain and visualize how each feature to be developed contributes to the goal(s) of that feature. It helps to clarify what behavior change it is trying to accomplish and for which persona. Are there different and more cost-effective ways to achieve that change? Perhaps we can test some of our assumptions earlier by making this connection. Are we sure that this behavior change will lead to these business results?

Figure 7.1 works from left to right and from right to left. It functions as an invitation to a conversation. But it puts the customer at the center of what we do, and that is what the Customer Representative is all about.