Chapter 6. Box 2: Business Outcomes

Figure 6-1. Box 2 of the Lean UX Canvas: Business Outcomes

We covered the concept of outcomes in Chapter 3. Box 2 is where they make their first appearance on the Lean UX Canvas. Once you’ve got a business problem statement, you want to dig deeper into the core behavior changes you’re seeking as part of the initiative. Typically, the success criteria in a problem statement are high-level. Success criteria there tend to be key performance indicators or impact metrics—the things that are found on executive dashboards. These could be metrics like revenue, profit, cost of goods sold, and customer satisfaction. These are helpful at measuring the health of the business, but feature-level teams need to work at a lower level.

In this exercise we work together to uncover the leading indicators of those impact metrics. The question we’re trying to answer is what will people be doing differently if our solutions work? If we choose the right combination of code, copy, and design, what do we expect to happen? The answers to these questions are what we’re looking for in this assumption declaration exercise.

Every option in this brainstorm should start with a verb, and each answer should be something valuable that customers do in the system already, something that’s not valuable that we’d like them to do less of, or something new that we think will be valuable and that we’d like them to start doing. In essence, we’re thinking through and highlighting user journeys.

Using the User Journey

The goal of this exercise is to find the valuable customer behaviors that we want to focus on. In order to do that, it’s helpful to start with a model of customer behavior—what are people doing today? What are they trying to do that’s difficult? What are they doing today that’s not productive for them or for us? What new, valuable behaviors can we unlock? To answer this question, we can use the idea of user journeys.

User journey mapping can be very simple. We can use a template, like Pirate Metrics or Metrics Mountain (both described below). Or we can use tools that we borrow from Service Design to create a user journey map. Regardless of the framework we choose, the idea is to gather the team and stakeholders around the map and generate a shared understanding of the journey of how people move through our system and which parts of that journey should be the focus of our work.

Depending on your circumstances, here are some models to get you started.

User Journey Type: Pirate Metrics

One way of coming up with your outcome metrics is using Pirate Metrics. Conceived at startup incubator 500 Startups, the Pirate Metrics funnel has become a standard way to think about the user journey through our products. We can use it here to help us determine which portions of that journey are relevant to the problem we’re addressing.

Pirate Metrics are made up of five types of customer behaviors:

Acquisition
These are the activities that get customers to the product in the first place. Viable options here include number of downloads, visits to the registration page, number of sign-ups, etc.
Activation
Once a customer has been acquired, we can start to measure whether or not they are actually using the product. Activation metrics include things like number of accounts created, number of people followed, percentage of new sign-ups that made a purchase, etc. These metrics should reflect the core functionality of the product.
Retention
If we can get customers to try the product, the next challenge is to get them to continue using it on a regular basis. “Regular basis” in this case will be contextual to your product. (For a product like Netflix, you would measure daily viewing habits, but if you make a smart “learning” thermostat, you’d likely measure how few interactions the user had with the device.) If we’re retaining customers, generally speaking, they’re coming back frequently to use the product, they’re doing more in the product, and they’re spending time too.
Revenue
If we got them to the product, convinced them to try it, and now they’re using it regularly, are they paying us? That’s the next level of commitment we look for in our customers. Our goal is to see where and how we’re converting customers into paid users and how those patterns evolve over time. Metrics to consider here include percentage of paid versus free users, average lifetime value of each customer, etc.
Referral
The final step in the Pirate Metrics funnel is assessing whether our customers are referring others to the product. If they truly love it, feel like they’re getting value from it, and can’t live without it, they’ll tell their friends or the internet through reviews. This is the best kind of marketing you can get. Metrics to track here include percentage of new users who came through referral, percentage of current users who refer others, and cost of acquisition per new user.

At this point you’ve probably noticed that the acronym for this method spells AARRR, which is, apparently, how pirates talk, hence the name Pirate Metrics. We can confidently say that neither of us has ever met a pirate, and therefore we cannot confirm that this is indeed pirate-speak.

User Journey Type: Metrics Mountain

One of the things that’s bothered us for a while about Pirate Metrics is its visualization as a funnel. In the real world, everything you put into a funnel comes out of that funnel. It takes a bit longer, but the idea that some of the liquid (for example) that you pour at the top of the funnel won’t make it out the bottom is ridiculous. Of course it will. There’s a hole at the other end! There had to be a better metaphor.

Instead of a funnel, we present Metrics Mountain (Figure 6-2).

Figure 6-2. Metrics Mountain. Concept by Jeff Patton and Jeff Gothelf.

The idea of a mountain to visualize the customer life cycle makes perfect sense because our goal is to get as many of our customers to the top of the mountain. Realistically, though, we’re going to lose people along the way. They’ll get tired. They’ll get bored. They’ll get distracted. They’ll defect to a competitor. Not every one of them will make it through (i.e., where the funnel metaphor breaks).

As your customers make their way up Metrics Mountain, they are asked to do more and more with your product or service (the climb gets harder). Your goal is to make that as easy a process as possible and to motivate them to keep going. Some of them will do that—especially if you have a compelling value proposition, user experience, and business model. But increasingly, as your customers make their way up the mountain, they will drop off. Our goal should be to build the kinds of experiences that get the highest percentage of people to the top of the mountain.

Facilitating Your Business Outcomes Conversation with Metrics Mountain

You can use the mountain metaphor to facilitate the conversation with your team and stakeholders about the behaviors you believe your users should be progressing through as they use your product. Here’s how to do that:

  1. Start at the base and identify the first thing a user has to do to begin using your product. How do you acquire them? How do they find the new feature you’re working on?

  2. Define a “plateau” on the mountain for each subsequent step of your customer journey and determine the user behavior it takes to get there.

  3. What percentage of users moving their way up the mountain would your team consider successful for each step? Add those numbers to the mountain diagram.

    • For example, of the 100% of your daily visitors, you would like to see at least 75% discover the new feature you’re building, and 50% of those folks give it a try. From there, you’d like to see at least 25% of those who tried to continue using the feature on a weekly basis, with 10% of them ultimately paying you for this new capability.

  4. If you’re not sure about your exact customer journey, start with Pirate Metrics as the five “ledges” of the mountain. This is a good way to kick off this exercise.

User Journey Type: Service Journeys and User Story Maps

Sometimes, visualizing the user journey as a funnel or a mountain doesn’t make sense. You know your product well, and these models may not apply to you. Don’t force it. Instead, you can build a Service Journey Map or User Story Map that more closely maps the way a user moves through your product or service. The form isn’t really important here: use the method that makes sense for you and your product. The goal is to be able to visualize the flow through the product in a way that you can all see and understand, then use that model to zoom in on the most important parts of the journey, identify the specific behaviors crucial to the success of your initiative, and determine the outcome metrics that would indicate success for that journey.

Outcome-to-Impact Mapping

Outcome-to-impact mapping is another technique to visualize the connection between the impact metrics in your business problem statement and the tactical outcomes you hope to see in your customers. It works well with your feature-level team and is also a powerful exercise to do together with your stakeholders.

This exercise also visualizes the concept of leading and lagging indicators. You’ll find that impact metrics are more often lagging indicators—backward-looking measures of what’s already taken place. As this exercise progresses, you’ll find many of the lower-level metrics, the outcomes, to be leading indicators. These behaviors are often the things that need to take place before we can achieve the impact metric. For example, a customer must first download our app before they can spend money on our service. The former is a leading indicator of the latter. What teams often find is there are many leading indicators for one or two impact metrics. This exercise helps shed light on that fact and forces a (hopefully) productive conversation about prioritization.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Gather the team and the product leads into a meeting room.

  2. On a whiteboard, ask the highest paid person in the room to write down the current strategic goal for the year at the top on a series of Post-it notes.

  3. Below that, ask that same person (or another executive) to list out the measures of success for that strategy (hint: these should be impact metrics and are often lagging indicators).

  4. Below each impact metric, start to draw lines protruding away from each one (like you’re building an org chart).

  5. Ask the room to fill out the line below the impact metrics with customer behaviors that drive those metrics (leading indicators). Use Post-its and have everyone work individually on an initial brainstorm.

  6. Now have the team do another row below the last one showing the customer behaviors that drive the initial set of outcomes.

At this point, your whiteboard should start to look like the map shown in Figure 6-3:

Figure 6-3. Outcome-to-impact mapping

Once everyone’s contributed, you should have dozens of Post-its on the board indicating a variety of customer behaviors (outcomes) that will help your company hit its strategic goal and impact targets. Also at this point, your team may be overwhelmed. Most times we’ve run this exercise, it never occurs to the team that there are so many ways to potentially drive positive change.

Now, the tough part. Through a round of dot voting (or other facilitated selection exercise), ask the team to pick the 10 outcomes they think they should focus on first.

What you’ve done here is create a direct connection between outcomes (customer behaviors) and impact metrics (the thing executives care about) and forced them to choose where you should focus for the next cycle. The last step is to create a baseline for each of these outcomes (i.e., where they are today) and a goal (i.e., where we’d like them to be at the end of the cycle) and assign them to the team as goals for their next cycle.

Now, each time a team reports progress on their specific outcome, their stakeholder will have a clear sense of why the team is working on that and how it affects the impact metrics they care most about.

What to Watch Out For

Not every number or percentage is an outcome metric. Jeff was working with a huge German retail conglomerate on this specific exercise. Their impact-level goal was to increase same store sales year over year. As we worked through the outcome-to-impact mapping exercise, a few team members added items to the outcome rows that read “percentage of products on the shelf that are our brand.” Now, technically, this is a metric, but it is not a measure of customer behavior. It is a product strategy decision that you hope will drive some customer behavior. A similar issue came up once with another client building an automation tool. A person on the team listed “percentage of manual tasks now automated by the system.” Again, this is not a measure of customer behavior. It’s a facet of the system being built, a product decision. The ultimate goal was to reduce the amount of time staff spent on repetitive tasks—which is a good outcome metric.

The other thing we’ve seen often is that these charts get messy. It’s easy to make them look neat in a book or PowerPoint slide. In reality, our businesses aren’t this linear, and these charts can get a bit unwieldy (Figure 6-4). Teams will often find that one outcome drives multiple impact metrics (this is perfectly reasonable) and has to be duplicated across the chart. Build the chart that works for your business and your team. Just don’t compromise the content of the exercise.

Figure 6-4. Real world example of an outcome to impact map, courtesy of Delphine Sassi and the team at King
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