Using outcomes to guide product work
Implementing an outcome-focused approach involves several key steps
1. Define clear business and product outcomes
Start by clearly defining the desired outcomes. These should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART).
According to Continuous Discovery Habits, there are two broad types of outcomes: business outcomes, and product outcomes.
- A business outcome benefits the organization. It is a lagging indicator, telling you what has already happened as a result of product decisions or outcomes.
- By the time you see a change in revenue, it is the end result of your team making a series of changes over a period of time. You can rarely attribute it to a single initiative.
- Example: Boosting revenue
- A product outcome improves your product in order to create positive business outcomes. It is a leading indicator and gives you early signs of what might happen to business outcomes.
- Product outcomes allow teams to measure the impact of their decisions on customer behavior, in iterative cycles. These decisions will ultimately affect business outcomes.
- Example: Increasing conversion rate from evaluations to purchase
At Atlassian, we use the Objective and Key Results (OKR) framework to define and measure outcomes. Learn more about how to use OKRs on the Atlassian Team Playbook.
2. Align teams around outcomes
Once objectives are clear, communicate them to all teams. People need to understand not just the objectives themselves, but how day-to-day work will achieve them in a practical sense.
Across the company, set team goals that ladder up to these organizational outcomes (we’ll unpack how to do this next). Of course, individual teams can also start focusing on outcomes over outputs, even if the rest of their organization hasn’t yet.
When prioritizing, center discussions around these desired outcomes. Break free from the “when is X going to ship?” type of discussions — instead, the goal should be product roadmaps that are grounded in insights and focused on impact.
3. Iterate to reach outcomes
With this approach, delivering specific features becomes secondary to hitting goals. Teams will try some things that fail, and others that work. Create an environment where it’s easy and fast to fail, and teams have the psychological safety to experiment.
During planning, encourage teams to hypothesize how their work will drive the desired outcomes, and test whether they were correct. This approach promotes an experimental mindset, with teams continuously iterating to improve and validate their assumptions.
Success and progress can be measured in two ways:
- Qualitative signals, like user feedback
- Quantitative metrics, like conversion rates
Focus review discussions around these indicators, and use this data to inform how you iterate.
Opportunity Solution Tree
An Opportunity Solution Tree (OST), popularized by Teresa Torres, is a way of visualizing business and product outcomes, and the opportunities, solutions and experiments that can be used to achieve them.
OSTs are a great way for teams to keep track of why they are pursuing specific solutions, their hypothesized impact on defined outcomes, and other potential ideas and solutions to iterate on.
We created this OST using Confluence whiteboards, but it’s easily done in Jira Product Discovery as well with a bit of configuration.
Below you'll find
- A demo of grouping solutions by opportunities in Jira Product Discovery
- A tutorial on how to reproduce this configuration
Demo: grouping solutions by opportunities
Tutorial on how to reproduce this configuration in JPD
How the Jira Product Discovery team used the VMGS framework to rally the team around outcomes
When creating Jira Product Discovery, the Atlassian team relied heavily on an outcomes-led way of working. We used the Vision, Mission, Goals, and Strategies (VMGS) framework to keep our work focused on strategic outcomes.
An outcomes-focused approach can benefit nearly any aspect of product teams’ work, not just product strategy. In this section, we’ll share our strategy when building Jira Product Discovery as an example, to show how outcomes can guide product work.
VMGS: vision, mission, goals and strategies
Prioritizing a roadmap is much simpler when the entire team envisions a clear, shared path to success. There’s no ambiguity about the ultimate outcomes you’re working towards, and which strategies you’ll iterate on to get there.
To define that path, our team created a Vision, Mission, Goals and Strategies (VMGS) one-pager.
We wrote this document collaboratively, in a series of workshops discussing why we are creating Jira Product Discovery as a product, for whom, and how it can benefit Atlassian as a business.
A strong VMGS one-pager will get everyone feeling connected to each other, their daily work, and the project’s ultimate goals. Keep it clear and simple — don’t use fancy words, overly descriptive language, or industry jargon.
The Jira Product Discovery team’s VMGS one-pager
Vision
A vision statement describes the future, ideal end state. Assuming the project is successful, this is how the world looks when it’s complete.
When building Jira Product Discovery, our vision was “product teams focused on strategic outcomes.” We wanted to build a world where the most successful companies have adopted a product model.
Mission
A mission statement describes the team’s unique point of view for how the vision is going to manifest.
The Jira Product Discovery team’s mission is “unleash the potential of product teams to make an impact.” This is a specialization of Atlassian’s mission,“unleash the potential in every team,” or uplift organizations by empowering their individual teams. Jira Product Discovery’s mission zeroes in on product teams, and gets specific that we’ll help them focus on the impact of their work, not just output.
Goals
Goals help measure success for the entire effort. They need to be measurable and time-bound.
Jira Product Discovery’s goal is to become a successful business by Atlassian standards. As a “North star metric,” we chose a specific business outcome: a revenue target for a specific year. Every month, we report progress on that metric to the rest of Atlassian. Having a single goal like this helps us adapt and change our strategies based on how successful they are in achieving this goal.
Strategies
Strategies are tactical ways the team is investing time and resources, betting they will help fulfill its mission and reach its goal. Strategies work best when they are clear, crisp, pragmatic and easy to understand.
Each strategy has a corresponding sub-goal to measure its success. These sub-goals typically try to improve a specific metric, qualitative or quantitative - for example SEQ score (Single Ease Question, a measure of perceived usability), or pirate metrics (AARRR: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue).
In green: business outcome. In dark blue: strategy and corresponding product outcome. In light blue: corresponding solution, to be measured by a specific metric.
Let’s zoom in on a detailed example of one goal, strategy, and metric:
Goal: $X ARR by 2026
Strategy: GTM, measured by revenue
Product Outcome: Enable GTM teams, measured by revenue from annual plans
Most customers buy Jira Product Discovery in self-service, but the larger customers do that via an Atlassian account executive or a partner, typically via an annual plan. The success of this strategy is measured based on revenue coming from customers on the annual plan.
Solution: “evangelize practices and the product management ways of working”.
We received plenty of feedback from evaluators that they struggle with a lack of awareness on how to work with the product model, and how to use Jira Product Discovery in that model. This is a point of friction preventing evaluators from adopting the product.
We are writing this handbook as part of this tactic. We’ll measure its success by testing it with a number of customers to understand if adoption rates are higher. If it is successful, we’ll invest more in this tactic and strategy.
Tracking goals
We create goals and sub-goals (one for each strategy) as Goals in Atlas, and use Atlas to report our progress for each goal every month to the rest of the company.
Note: Atlas is moving to the Atlassian Platform and becoming free.
The platform experience for Goals is currently available in early access and you can opt to use it here. Whether you use Atlas or the platform experience, you can use Goals in your Jira Product Discovery projects by turning on the feature - to do so, follow instructions here.
Updating the VMGS
Over time, our understanding of the product and its goals will evolve, based on what we continue to learn. That’s why every 3-6 months, we review the VMGS collaboratively as a team.
If our team’s goal was climbing a mountain, it’s important that everyone is clear that the objective is to reach the summit (or go back to base camp). They also need an understanding of the paths different groups are exploring to get there. Some paths will lead to a dead-end, some will take them faster to the top. A checkpoint every once in a while helps review available options and pick next steps.
So far while building Jira Product Discovery, we’ve found:
- The vision and mission have remained stable over the past 3 years.
- We review the goal every quarter based on a financial model comprised of both assumptions and real growth data.
- The strategies have remained stable for the past year, but our tactics to achieve them change every 3 to 6 months.
At any point in time, we are only actively pursuing a subset of strategies. The whole team is clear on what we’re saying “yes” to and “no” to — both are important to have clear prioritization discussions.
Here’s a snapshot from the early stages of the product. The tactics in gray weren’t being actively pursued at this time.
What's next?
In the rest of this handbook, we’ll explain in detail how to use a product backlog to:
- Create and prioritize a product backlog
- Take ideas from inception to delivery
- Set up feedback channels and gather insights to validate ideas
- Prioritize the ideas that can make an impact
- Create roadmaps your teams and stakeholders can rally behind
We’ll give examples for how we do this in the Jira Product Discovery team, using Jira Product Discovery and other products.
You can also watch this demo for an end-to-end example:
Introduction
Learn more about why we wrote this handbook and how it can help.
Product backlog
Learn how to effectively manage product backlogs to prioritize ideas, enhance collaboration, and drive product development.