“Desired End State” — Use It, Love It, Elevate Your Game with It
This sexy phrase helps you and those around you lead better by clarifying what’s being asked for
What Is It?
The desired end state is a concise description, written or verbal, of the final result of some task or project.
Possible usages:
- “What is your desired end state?”
- “My desired end state is…”
Basically, you’re asking for or painting the picture of what you want. Some examples:
- “So, I think your desired end state for this technical roadmap is that our customers will have much greater confidence in our security and privacy controls. Did I get that right?”
- “My desired end state is that, after tomorrow’s presentation, the client is supremely confident that we understand their pain points in depth and that we have the best solution at the right price compared to the competition.”
- “Our desired end state for this product roadmap is that our users are delighted regularly by our content and return to the site more regularly while reducing our paid advertising and marketing budgets.”
The phrase originates from military and strategic planning. As an official military concept, it has a big role in planning large and complex military operations, but here, we’re just discussing its use for managers and individual contributors working in small teams in day-to-day corporate life.
As someone who juggled parallel careers for several years in the San Francisco tech scene¹ and the Army Reserve,² and serving in all manner of leadership positions, I’ve seen how effective this phrase is at giving clarity to any plan, and I’m pretty excited to see this phrase get more use in corporate life.
Let Me Extol the Benefits
It doesn’t require an explanation. Everyone will intuitively know what you want when using this phrase, which isn’t true with corporate jargon or niche industry terms. It doesn’t matter if they’re new to the company, or from a different department, or so incompetent that they’re the reason why your IT Help Desk asks things like, “Is your device plugged in and turned on?” They will just get it.
But if you do explain it, it sounds even more cool, and you will impress your coworkers and bosses. Just memorize this bit and have it in your hip pocket:
In the U.S. military and NATO, the phrase is used in a larger operations planning process that specifies the Mission Statement and Commander’s Intent, and, in addition to a “desired end state,” includes things like quantitative and qualitative success metrics, the purpose, or “why,” of the operation, and key tasks to be accomplished.
It’s fun to say and sexy as f*ck. It just sounds exciting and powerful. It even has the word desire in it. Just try to say it out loud to yourself right now. Or find a current email or Slack thread going off the rails and write, “So, what’s our desired end state here?” That was fun, right?
It’s more poetic than the corporate version. The corporate version of this concept is: What does success look like? Yawn… Boriiinnng. This is like if Taylor Swift wrote, “It has been so, so hard / getting over my last breakup” instead of “But no amount of freedom gets you clean / I’ve still got you all over me”.³
Speaking of Taylor Swift, imagine if you landed your dream job of working on her core staff (okay, well, my dream job, at least). Let’s say you were discussing with her some confusing part of, I dunno, the next album release’s merch marketing plan. Do you think she would say, “I’m not sure I understand… so, what does success look like here?” Or would she say, “Hmm.. what’s our desired end state here?”? Which do you think a great American songwriter would choose??⁴ And if, instead, you were to express the same thought, which do you think would impress her more?
It can be used for introspection. If you get lost in a task, you can ask yourself, “What is my desired end state?” or “What is the desired end state that my boss or stakeholders want?”
It’s a fun way to clarify vague guidance or short-circuit micromanagers. When you feel a goal is too vaguely defined for you, asking, “What is your desired end state?” can encourage them to introspect and come back with more specific guidance.
Conversely, if you’re getting directives that are so specific that they cross into micromanagement, asking this question can encourage your boss or coworker to think about what final result they are looking for and less about the “how.”
It makes meetings more productive (and makes you look sharp in front of your peers). We’ve all been there. The meeting that goes nowhere, perhaps undermined by a vague agenda and conflicting assumptions, and, well, what are we trying to do here, exactly?? If you’re midway through one of these staggeringly painful meetings, try salvaging it by saying, “So, help me understand. What is our desired end state?” or “So what is the desired end state of this meeting?” This comes off as straightforward, assertive, and professional, whereas it’s harder to keep a sarcastic or annoyed tone out of, say, “What is the point of this meeting?” or “Remind me why we’re having this meeting again?” or (if working from home) “Hold on, I need to find my cat for emotional support.”
As a side note, wouldn’t it be cool if we could claim a mental health disability regarding extravagantly pointless meetings? Then maybe “reasonable accommodation” could be your employer paying for your cat, er, emotional support animal?
For managers, it’s a great way to lead and empower your team. Painting a picture of the end result encourages your team or direct report to learn to think for themselves and figure out their own solutions.
If you’re prone to micromanagement, getting into a habit of thinking in terms of a well-composed desired end state will help you better calibrate the best level of detail for your direct reports.
For managers and mentors, it’s a great coaching tool. A person can sometimes get lost in things like project exit criteria, complex milestones, navigating weird politics, or what-have-you, so coaching someone to develop and write down their own “desired end state” to keep as their “North Star” will keep them on track.
You can also see what a person is capable of by asking them to think in a more results-oriented way. For example, let’s say your direct report, Kate, brings up a classic issue: For process X, everyone does it differently, and something always gets missed. Kate proposes a classic response: make a checklist and add the list to the team’s wiki space. Inevitably, this action would engender a classic team behavior: Hardly anyone remembers that the checklist exists, so you, as the manager, would have to enforce the checklist for many weeks to get people into the proper habits, which may not be worth your time if it’s not a mission-critical process. Thus, the checklist would likely go into the sad Waste Bin of Failed Process Improvements and Wasted Effort.
Instead, you say, “Well, Kate, I think this checklist is a good idea, but my desired end state is that process X is uniformly implemented by all team members with nothing significant dropped. Can you make that happen?” (Bonus points if you coach her to develop her own desired end state.) Ahhhh, now the emphasis is not on creating and posting the checklist. Instead, Kate might volunteer to do quality control to enforce compliance for the next six weeks (less work for you!), or annoyingly remind everyone about this checklist at the daily stand-ups for the next six months, or make cute, hot pink stickers with the checklist on each one and put them on everyone’s monitors. Who knows what creative leadership will come of this.
By giving her a more expansive goal, you give her a chance to develop deeper leadership skills (or give her a chance to come to her own conclusion that it’s not worth the effort after analysis of this and other priorities, which is its own leadership practice to develop).
Main Usage Tip
Be concise. In my Army days, I once got access to the master operation order governing the U.S. military’s role in the 2010 Haiti earthquake relief effort, one of the biggest disasters to hit the Americas in recent memory (Wikipedia). The order was hundreds of pages of planning info, from intelligence assessments to logistical analysis to civil affairs briefs. However, the Desired End State only stated:
Lives safeguarded, human suffering mitigated, and GoH [Government of Haiti], UN/MINUSTAH [UN peacekeepers] no longer require significant U.S. military support.
When talking about your desired end state, keep things short. The end state is meant to be worded somewhat informally, without legalistic precision or precise numbers. You can discuss things like the purpose (i.e. the “why”), key tasks or milestones, and quantitative success metrics as separate topics, using whatever template your organization has likely already provided. (For those interested, the military has specific doctrine on how all this fits together.)
Bonus points if you make your desired end state sound poetic. Your boss, Taylor, would be extra proud.
Conclusion
The concept of painting the picture of the final results in concise, poetic terms is not new. Things like Agile Story-writing templates⁵, storyboards, mood boards, and visual mock-ups are used in corporate life all the time. That said, given all of the benefits listed above, for the effort of a moment of introspection, while having fun and looking cool, I humbly submit that desired end state is the best thing you can use.
Regardless, my desired end state for this article is that you have a more fun and fulfilling corporate life through the use of this phrase. Who knows? — You might even do better work!
I would love to hear your opinions! Do you agree? Have you tried it? What happened? Please leave a comment!
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¹ I’ve been both a Software Engineer and Engineering Manager at Yelp, going on nine years, as well as nine years in traditional corporate IT and IT consulting.
² For you military geeks or vets out there, I spent 21 years in the Army Reserve. Private First Class → Staff Sergeant (E-6) → Captain (O-3E). Four overseas deployments. Mostly worked in Transportation, though I started in Supply and ended in Civil Affairs. Yes, I was a POG. All my ‘war stories’ are about bureaucratic shenanigans that only other military bureaucrats would find funny.
³ Lyrics from “You All Over Me (From The Vault)” by Taylor Swift
⁴ I’m betraying my Swiftie tendencies here, but it’s objectively true!(ish) Some universities have courses dedicated to her works, and Stanford has a course about her with the words “great American songwriter” literally in the course title!
⁵ In Agile, there’s this Story-writing template. I.e. “As a [persona], I [want to], [so that].” Just like “desired end state,” this template invites someone to take broader ownership and think more holistically than a ticket description like, say, “Build [software component].”
