Most people aren't outcome-driven

We ran a four-day strategy program for about 40 product managers at Avanza. One of them said: “I thought I was outcome-driven, until I realized how quickly I start talking about features.”

She was good at her job. She believed she led with outcomes. Then she watched herself in real time, and the belief fell apart. Most people who call themselves outcome-driven start talking features within seconds. They don’t notice they’re doing it.

A team that thinks in features ships a roadmap of features. Then it wonders why the business numbers didn’t move. The cost lands on everyone: the engineers who built the thing, the leaders who funded it, and the customers who got a feature nobody asked the right question about.

The tell is the timer

Ask someone what they’re working on and time how long it takes before a solution shows up. “We’re improving onboarding” is fine for about four words, and then: “so we’re adding a progress bar and a welcome modal and a checklist.”

The solutions arrive before anyone has named what should change for the customer or the business. At Avanza we made the room do this to itself, out loud. People who had just called themselves outcome-led were naming components inside a single breath.

Features are concrete, and concrete things are easier to think about. A progress bar is something you can picture, assign and ship. “New users reach their first real action in their first session” is harder to hold in your head.

A small rewrite that changes the whole conversation

Before: “We’re going to build saved searches and price alerts for returning users.” It names what gets built and stops there.

After: “We want more returning users to come back within seven days, and we believe saved searches and price alerts are how.” It names the change you want (return rate inside a week) and demotes the features to a bet you can be wrong about.

The Before sentence can only be delivered or not delivered. The After sentence can be measured, and measurement lets you be wrong cheaply. If return rate doesn’t move, you kill the feature instead of defending it.

The rewrite costs you the comfort of a clear to-do list, though. The outcome version admits you might build saved searches and still fail. That discomfort is why people drift back to feature talk.

Why one habit needs five capabilities

Staying outcome-driven takes five separate skills, and the feature reflex wins wherever one of them is missing. That’s what we taught at Avanza.

• Write a measurable business outcome. If you can’t state the number that should move, “outcome” is just a nicer word for a feature.
• Find opportunities through intentional research instead of guessing. Skipping it turns the roadmap into a list of untested assumptions.
• Prioritize hard and deprioritize out loud, even when everything feels important. A backlog where nothing is cut is a backlog of features by default.
• Use storytelling to align leadership and teams. An outcome that lives only in your head loses every meeting to a feature someone can demo.
• Translate strategy into a focused roadmap. The roadmap is the last place the feature reflex hides.

”But features are outcomes, this is just semantics”

A feature ships, customers use it, the metric moves, so the feature is the outcome. Saved searches bring people back. Calling that an “outcome” instead of a “feature” is just consultants relabeling work that was already getting done. A feature can produce an outcome.

“Features are outcomes” only holds when the feature works. You find that out at the end, after you’ve spent the engineering weeks. Leading with the outcome forces the question before the build: what number should move, by how much, and what happens if this feature doesn’t move it?

Teams that conflate the two ship saved searches, return rate stays flat, and the feature lives on anyway, because no one wrote down what it was supposed to do.

The first move

Take the thing you’re building this quarter and write one sentence: the number you expect to move, by how much, and the feature you’re betting will move it. If you can write that sentence, you’re leading with the outcome.

If you reach for the feature first and the number won’t come, you just found the gap that room at Avanza found in themselves. And if you can write the number but have no idea whether it’s any good, that’s what a benchmark is for: https://benchmark.scilla.studio.