What’s the Difference Between User Outcomes and Business Outcomes?

In Outcomes Over Output, I’ve written about how teams can be more outcome-centric in their work. A few questions keep coming up, so I thought I’d answer some of them here. This then is the first in a series of Q/A follow-ups to the book.

In the Outcomes Over Output, I define an outcome as “a change in human behavior that drives business results.” This leads pretty naturally to questions like this one:

“…it’s a perfectly practical definition: a change in human behavior that drives business results. But this is clearly from the perspective of the business; a customer doesn’t, nor shouldn’t, care about business results in seeking remedy to their struggles. But as customers or consumers, we unconsciously seek outcomes of our own. So, how do you define outcomes from the customer perspective?

In other words, what about the user?

What About The User?

This question gets at a critical point that I (unfortunately) didn’t include in the book: the definition of value is related to your perspective, your point-of-view. In other words, there is business value, customer value, user value.

Here’s an example: imagine a SaaS business that sells expense tracking software. For a service like this, you might see a system of value that looks like this:

Business Value:

• Customers subscribe to our SaaS product at a higher rate.
• Customers adopt new features at the intended rate.
• Customer churn is reduced.

For a Customer, value is:

• My company can track travel expenses more accurately, and pay them promptly, while avoiding paying non-reimbursable expenses.

For a User, value is:

• It takes me less time to submit expense reports and get reimbursed for expenses.

In other words, users don’t care about the same things that customers care about, customers don’t care about the same thing users care about, and businesses don’t care about the same thing that either of these groups care about.

Aligning Outcomes

In practice, this has two important implications. First, you have to do the work to identify the way the different humans in the system think about value. If you don’t understand this, you will, at best, miss an opportunity to serve your market. At worst, you will risk delivering products and services that exploit your users’ needs.

Second, you want to try to construct a system that creates value for your organization by delivering value to your customers and users.

In the example above, you’d probably start with a hypothesis that reads something like:

If we make it easy for users to enter and submit their expense reports, our customers will see faster and more accurate expense reimbursements. In turn, that will help increase our subscription renewal rate.

In other words, we believe that if we make it possible for our users to behave in a new way, they will get value from that new behavior, and in turn, that new behavior will generate value for us as an organization.

The Takeaway

Given all this, I’m thinking that I’ll want to use a slightly revised definition of Outcomes, one that still centers behavior change, but that acknowledges the idea of perspective. What do you think of this revision?

An outcome is “a change in human behavior that creates value.”

Let me know what you think…