Unlocking business success with Outcomes Over Output: A clear guide to Joshua Seiden’s method

Quick orientation

Joshua Seiden’s “Outcomes Over Output” presents a compelling argument for shifting business focus from merely producing “stuff” (outputs) to achieving meaningful changes in customer behavior that drive real business results (outcomes). This book is highly relevant for anyone involved in product development, management, or organizational leadership, especially those working in agile environments or seeking to make their work more impactful.

This summary will guide you through the core concepts of each chapter, offering simple, clear explanations of every key idea. You’ll learn why prioritizing customer behavior change is crucial and how to implement this approach in your own work and organization.

Chapter 1: What are outcomes?

This chapter introduces the fundamental concept of outcomes by contrasting them with outputs. It asks: why should we focus on changing customer behavior rather than just creating features, and what exactly does “outcome” mean in a business context?

The problem with just making stuff

Many teams, even those practicing agile methodologies, fall into the trap of focusing on what they are making—their output—rather than the actual value they are delivering.

• Author’s experience: Joshua Seiden shares a story from his Wall Street job where his “agile team” spent two years building a complex trading app (output) that ultimately failed because it didn’t address actual customer needs or deliver business value (outcomes).
• Output definition: This refers to the features, products, or services a team creates, like a new app or a built well.
• “Done” is deceptive: Software is rarely “done.” Focusing on shipping features doesn’t guarantee value; many features are built, work as specified, but annoy users or go unused, like excessive website pop-ups or most buttons on a microwave.
• Outcome definition: An outcome is a change in human behavior that drives business results. It’s about what customers, users, or employees do differently that benefits the business.
• Value linkage: Outcomes are achieved when you deliver the right features, ideally as few as possible, to cause the desired behavior change.

Understanding the levels: Output, outcome, impact

The Program Logic Model, often used in social impact sectors, helps clarify the relationship between what we do and the results we seek.

• Resources and activities: These are the inputs and actions taken, like funding and building a well.
• Output: This is the direct result of activities, such as the completed well.
• Outcome: This is the change in behavior due to the output, for example, villagers spending less time carrying water because of the new well. This is measurable and closer to the team’s work.
• Impact: This is the broader, higher-level result, like an improved standard of living in the village or increased company revenue. Impacts are often too complex for a single team to target directly.
• Managerial focus: Managers should guide teams towards outcomes (specific customer behavior changes) rather than just outputs (features) or vague impacts (grow revenue).

Outcomes, agility, and experiments

Focusing on outcomes naturally leads to a more agile and experimental way of working, especially when uncertainty is high.

• Early value delivery: A core agile principle is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of value. Outcomes provide a clear definition of “value.”
• Hypotheses: Since we can’t always know if our outputs will create the desired outcomes, we should frame our ideas as hypotheses (e.g., “We believe X will result in Y”).
• Experiments (MVPs): A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) isn’t version 1.0; it’s an experiment – the smallest thing you can do or make to test if your hypothesis about achieving an outcome is correct.
• Iterative learning: Teams set an outcome goal, design an experiment (MVP) to test a hypothesis, then test and learn, repeating until the best solution is found.
• Empowerment: This approach gives teams a meaningful business goal and the freedom to experiment their way to the best solution, even when the path isn’t clear.

This chapter establishes that outcomes are changes in human behavior leading to business results, providing a more effective target for teams than simply producing features, and fostering a truly agile, value-driven approach.

Chapter 2: Using outcomes

Now that we understand what outcomes are, this chapter explores how to identify and use them effectively to set team goals, track progress, and make better decisions. The central question is: how do we translate high-level business desires into actionable, outcome-focused work?

From impact to outcome

Executives often care about high-level “impact” metrics like increasing revenue or decreasing costs, but these are too broad for teams to act on directly.

• Executive concerns: Leaders focus on overall organizational performance (e.g., revenue, market share), which are impacts.
• Actionable parts: To make these impacts achievable, they must be broken down into smaller, actionable outcomes related to human behavior.
• Specific definition: An outcome is strictly defined as “a change in human behavior that drives business results,” applicable to users, customers, or employees.

Finding the right outcomes

Identifying impactful outcomes involves understanding the connection between customer actions and business success.

• Key question: Ask, “What are the customer behaviors that drive business results?”
• Example (t-shirt store): If the impact goal is to increase customer loyalty (e.g., visits from once to twice a month), potential outcomes could be “customers open our newsletter more frequently” or “customers share images of our shirts more frequently on social media.”
• Observable and measurable: Because outcomes are about what people do, they can be observed and measured, making them effective management tools.

Leading vs. lagging indicators

Understanding the difference between these indicators helps in focusing efforts on what truly predicts success.

• Lagging indicators: These measure past performance, like customer return rate. They tell you what happened but not how to improve.
• Leading indicators: These are behaviors that predict future success. If social sharing of t-shirts increases return visits, then social sharing is a leading indicator—an outcome to focus on.
• Predictive power: Identifying leading indicators (outcomes) allows teams to actively work on changing specific behaviors to achieve desired business results.

Hypotheses and experiments

Uncertainty is common when trying to generate outcomes, so a structured approach to testing assumptions is vital.

• Assumptions as hypotheses: If you’re unsure whether a behavior (e.g., social sharing) will lead to an impact (e.g., repeat visits), treat it as an assumption and frame it as a hypothesis: “We believe that if people share pictures of our t-shirts at a greater rate, it will prompt existing customers to return to our site at a greater rate. We’ll know we’re right when we see a correlation between social shares and return visits.”
• MVPs as tests: An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is the smallest experiment conducted to test such a hypothesis.
• System understanding: This process encourages teams to deeply understand how their business operates and what truly influences customer behavior.

The magic questions

Three fundamental questions help in finding and using outcomes effectively.

• Question 1: What are the user and customer behaviors that drive business results? This identifies the target outcome and fosters customer-centricity.
• Question 2: How can we get people to do more of those behaviors? This explores potential solutions (features, policies, promotions) aimed at behavior change, broadening the solution space.
• Question 3: How do we know that we’re right? This uncovers system dynamics and identifies necessary tests and metrics to measure progress.

Tracking progress and writing better OKRs

Outcomes provide a clearer way to track progress and formulate goals like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

• Clearer progress: Instead of tracking features built, progress is measured by changes in behavior (e.g., “Are tech support calls decreasing?”).
• Alignment: This approach aligns teams with leaders by demonstrating how their work directly contributes to business impacts.
• Starting question for leaders: “What (user/customer/employee) behaviors has this initiative created that are driving business results?”
• Better OKRs: Think of Key Results as outcomes. If an Objective is “Successfully Launch our New Product,” Key Results could be “25 positive reviews in app store in first day” or “1000 new user registrations in first week”—all measurable behaviors.

By focusing on specific, measurable human behaviors that drive business results, this chapter shows how to make strategic goals actionable and progress tangible.

Chapter 3: Outcomes-based planning

This chapter tackles how to plan work, particularly roadmaps, using outcomes, especially when dealing with complex systems and inherent uncertainty. The main aim is to move beyond feature-lists and develop plans that are flexible and focused on achieving desired behavioral changes.

The trouble with traditional roadmaps

Traditional roadmaps often create more frustration than clarity because they are built on uncertain predictions about features and timelines.

• Roadmap purpose: Roadmaps are meant to provide visibility into future work and deliveries.
• Common failure: They often become lists of features with promised delivery dates that are guesses, fiction, or even lies, especially for work filled with unknowns.
• Root cause: This failure stems from output-based planning, promising specific features by specific dates despite high uncertainty.
• Analogy: Predicting an arrival date for crossing an uncharted desert of unknown size would be reckless; similarly, promising fixed features and dates for uncertain product development is problematic.

A better approach: Planning around outcomes

Instead of features, plans and roadmaps should be built around themes of work, problems to solve, or outcomes to deliver.

• Uncertainty management: The less certain you are that your outputs (features) will deliver the desired results, the more it makes sense to plan in terms of outcomes.
• Systems of outcomes: This requires identifying not just single outcomes, but related sets of outcomes that together create the desired impact.
• Customer journey mapping: A powerful method for finding these systems of outcomes.

Mapping the customer journey

A customer journey map is a visual tool from service design that helps understand and improve user interactions.

• Definition: A diagram that describes, from left to right, what people (customers, employees) do when interacting with a product or service.
• Visualization of behavior: It lets teams see current behaviors within the system.
• Outcome identification: This makes it useful for finding outcomes—which behaviors to encourage, eliminate, or which might be missing that could drive business results.

Case study: Improving Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A non-profit client aimed to improve their NPS, an impact-level metric.

• Current state analysis: The team created a customer journey map with lanes for seller behaviors, buyer behaviors, and organization/system behaviors.
• Identifying boosters and blockers: They then marked behaviors that predicted success (“boosters,” e.g., buyers and sellers meeting in person early) and those predicting failure (“blockers,” e.g., difficulty meeting due to location).
• From impact to outcomes: This led to specific, measurable outcomes, like “increase the rate at which buyers and sellers meet early” and “decrease the rate at which meetings fail due to location.”
• Roadmap of questions/hypotheses: The roadmap was expressed in terms of questions (“How might we encourage X?”) or hypotheses (“We believe if we do Y, it will lead to Z. We will test ideas A, B, C in Q1.”).

Universality of the method

This customer journey mapping approach can be used to tackle any impact-level goal.

• Example (increasing sales): Create a customer journey map, then ask, “What behaviors predict higher sales, and how can we encourage them?”
• Flexibility: The method adapts to various business challenges by focusing on understanding and influencing the behaviors within the relevant customer journey.

This chapter demonstrates how to shift planning from rigid feature lists to flexible, outcome-focused roadmaps by understanding customer journeys and framing work as experiments to achieve desired behavioral changes.

Chapter 4: Organizing for outcomes

Successfully implementing an outcome-focused approach often requires significant organizational changes. This chapter explores how companies can structure their teams and processes to effectively pursue outcomes, using HBR.org as a detailed case study.

The challenge of traditional structures

Many organizations are structured around making specific things (outputs) rather than achieving outcomes, which can hinder collaboration and impact.

• Siloed teams: Teams are often organized by product (e.g., iOS app team) or channel, making it hard to coordinate on broader initiatives like “re-engaging customers” across multiple touchpoints.
• Prioritizing outputs: Such structures implicitly prioritize outputs over outcomes.

HBR.org’s journey to outcomes

The team at HBR.org (Harvard Business Review’s website) transitioned from output-based to outcome-based work.

• Initial problem: A major redesign of their “Item Detail Page” (IDP) was feature-focused, and leadership couldn’t confidently connect the new features to delivered value. The project didn’t yield expected returns.
• Reflection: The team realized that if they had focused on an outcome like “Boost sales by 10% from IDP,” they might have achieved it faster and with simpler changes (e.g., making the buy button bigger).
• New project framing: For their next project (reducing “subscription funnel bounce rate”), they focused on the business impact, used data to find where bounces occurred (price reveal), and interviewed users to understand why (confusing price display).
• Outcome linking: They aimed for a user outcome (less confusion at price display) to achieve a business outcome (higher purchase completion rate), using the formula: If we create this outcome for the user, it will deliver this outcome for the business.

Changing workflows and managing expectations

The shift required HBR.org to modify how teams collaborated and how they communicated with stakeholders.

• Improved collaboration: They moved from product managers competing for resources to more collaborative workflows, emphasizing lo-fi design, early developer-designer engagement, and user testing.
• Defining “done”: Stakeholders initially wanted fixed dates and feature sets. The team had to shift this to defining “done” as making satisfactory progress on an outcome, established through hypotheses and success measures, and committing to review performance and iterate.
• Building trust: Initially, stakeholder trust was low due to a massive backlog and slow progress. The team wiped the entire backlog clean, signaling a fresh start.

Aligning and organizing around outcomes

HBR.org restructured its intake process and team organization to support the new approach.

• Goal setting: They began quarterly goal-setting meetings with executive leadership to agree on the top three outcomes for the next quarter.
• Stakeholder input: Product managers then discussed these executive goals with functional stakeholders, asking for work requests focused on problems, hypotheses, and desired achievements (outcomes) rather than features.
• Shifting conversation: When direct outcome requests were difficult, asking stakeholders “What are you worried about?” helped surface underlying business problems and align priorities.
• Team structure: They reorganized teams around high-level outcomes: a “Buy” team (for e-commerce goals) and a “Consume” team (for content engagement goals), plus an “Operations” team for run-of-business work.
• Stakeholder engagement: The teams increased the frequency of check-ins with stakeholders and shared learnings from retrospectives, including failures, which built trust.
• Positive results: Stakeholder satisfaction improved significantly, and the team confidently produced meaningful business results, developing a new understanding of their “product” as being organized around outcomes.

This chapter illustrates that organizing for outcomes is a journey involving changes in team structure, workflows, goal-setting, and stakeholder relationships, ultimately leading to more impactful work.

Chapter 5: Outcomes for transformation

The principles of outcome-based thinking are not limited to product and service development; they are equally powerful when applied to transforming the organization itself. This chapter explains how to use outcomes to drive internal change effectively.

Applying outcomes to internal change

Just as outcomes focus on customer behavior for products, they can focus on employee and leader behavior for organizational change.

• HBR.org example: The HBR.org team iteratively changed their own working behaviors to better deliver product outcomes, demonstrating an internal application of outcome principles.
• Non-profit example: The NPS-focused team considered changes in their internal staff’s behavior as part of improving their service.
• Core idea: You can apply the question—”how can we change employee behavior in a way that generates business results?”—to your organization’s transformation efforts.

Rule 1: Your colleagues are your customers

Treating internal stakeholders as customers is key to successful organizational change.

• Strategy team example: A team struggling with regional strategy alignment was encouraged to see regional leaders as “customers” of the strategy.
• Understanding needs: The strategy would “sell” if it met leaders’ needs, solved their problems, and provided value.
• Internal customer-centricity: This approach applies customer-centric thinking to peers, colleagues, and stakeholders, which is vital in large organizations where many operate far from external customers.

Rule 2: Everything is an outcome

Define the desired changes in internal behaviors as specific, observable outcomes.

• Strategy team challenge: What does it look like when a leader “buys” the strategy?
• Desired behavior changes: The team identified new leadership behaviors they sought, such as:
  • Clarity: Leaders consistently reciting the same three strategic bullet points.
  • Process adherence: Leaders using new guidelines for changing strategy in checkpoint meetings, preventing constant reversals.
• Targeted strategy: These behavioral outcomes informed what the strategy needed to include (e.g., three memorable bullets, clear change guidelines) and how it needed to be communicated.
• Foundation for change: Expressing the desired transformation in terms of specific behavioral outcomes allows for targeted change programs.

Rule 3: Everything is an experiment

Organizational change is complex and benefits from an iterative, action-oriented approach rather than rigid, top-down planning.

• Innovation leader example: An innovation leader wanted to raise awareness for new technology. She emailed 400 key employees with a call to action for training. The high response rate (1 in 3) validated interest and informed next steps.
• Experimental mindset: She treated employees as customers, ran a small “marketing campaign” (the email), gauged interest, and learned from the outcome.
• Agile transformation: This experimental approach to achieving internal behavior change fosters a deeply agile way to approach transformation within organizations. Try something, see if it works, and invest further if successful.

By viewing colleagues as customers, defining desired internal changes as behavioral outcomes, and embracing an experimental approach, organizations can navigate the complexities of transformation more effectively.

Big-picture wrap-up

“Outcomes Over Output” by Joshua Seiden champions a fundamental shift in how businesses approach their work: from a preoccupation with creating features (outputs) to a clear focus on instigating specific, valuable changes in customer behavior (outcomes). This customer-centric methodology not only aligns teams with real business results but also fosters agility, empowers experimentation, and can even guide successful organizational transformation. By asking what behaviors drive success and how to encourage them, companies can deliver more value, more efficiently.

• Core takeaway: True business success comes from changing customer behavior in ways that deliver value, not just from building more stuff.
• Next action: Identify one key business result you care about. Then ask: “What specific customer (or user/employee) behavior, if changed, would most directly lead to that result?” This is your first outcome to explore.
• Practical application: Use the “magic questions” (What behaviors drive results? How can we get more of them? How do we know we’re right?) to guide your next project or initiative.
• Shift mindset: Start thinking of MVPs not as first versions of products, but as small experiments to test your hypotheses about achieving outcomes.
• For leaders: Encourage your teams to define success in terms of outcomes and give them the autonomy to experiment and find the best ways to achieve those outcomes.
• Reflective question: How much of your current work is focused on delivering features versus intentionally changing specific human behaviors for the better?