Outcome Focused Effort page

Properly Understood Goals Have Value

There’s a lot that goes into building, marketing, and selling a successful product. By appropriately prioritizing each of these activities, your team will be empowered to focus on productivity that adds the most value. When every team member understands these higher level goals and priorities, each will be able to appreciate the contributions of those in other areas. Everyone will be working towards a common goal.

The most important activities to get right (listed in priority order):

1. Goals - Everyone should know what they are trying to accomplish.
2. Product Management - Processes add value to customers and work towards successful outcomes.
3. UX & Design - A user experience designed to add value for customers.
4. Tools and Technology - Tools that support efficient delivery of the above goals.

While it might seem counterintuitive that technology at the bottom of the list, the truth is, technology is the least important aspect of technology delivery.

Technology is the least important aspect of technology delivery

How can this be? You just built an error-free, highly performant, extremely maintainable (flexible) application quickly!

However, consider what happens to that application if it:

• has a terrible user experience
  • Users will be confused, frustrated, or give up. The product will fail.
• is managed poorly
  • Unless you are lucky enough to get the application right on the first try, you will be unable to respond to feedback and quickly iterate. The product won’t improve, fall behind, and eventually fail.
• has misunderstood goals
  • Progress will be chaotic: team members end up siloed, focusing on individual goals or goals that are misinterpreted in the larger scheme.
• has the wrong goals
  • Sometimes the product doesn’t fit the market. No amount of technology changes that.

Despite all of this, technology choices are very important. Applications are built on code after all - a slow application negatively influences user experience. An inflexible application won’t be able to change direction.

This course will cover all the afore-mentioned prioritized activities.

• For goals see Specific Goals.
• For product management and UX & Design see Informed Prioritization. (We see UX & Design as part of the product management process).
• For tools and technology see Efficient Development.

But before embarking on these trainings, it is critical that everyone on the team values outcome over output.

Here’s some Video Evidence

In 2014, Bitovi performed a review of its clients against a checklist of best practices. While far from scientific, the following video goes through the results:

To Summarize:

• A short time to delivery most strongly indicated success.
• It reaffirms the priorities listed above.

Take Action

If your product doesn’t have clear goals that create customer value, product management organized toward creating customer value, and design and development tools and technology that rapidly create customer value, then start working today to change this!

Being on successful projects is sublime.

"But wait!", I hear, "Easier said than done!"

There are likely many obstacles to change:

• You don’t have the authority to create change. You aren’t the CEO, partner, product owner, etc.
• You don’t have the information to recommend changes.
• The culture isn’t conducive to change and/or questioning authority.

Change is hard. If these challenges seem daunting, be patient: This course includes strategies for working through those obstacles. Effective Communication (the fifth and final core concept) is the foundation towards working through these sort of obstacles.