Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success

an outcome is a change in human behavior that drives business results

how do you write better OKRs? One way is to think of Key Results as outcomes. If you express your Key Result as a measurable customer behavior, you almost automatically have a well-written OKR.

even though OKRs sound like a good idea, it can be hard to write good OKRs. One reason is that it can be hard to name the Key Result that you’re looking to achieve. And when this happens, you often see teams just reverse engineering their current work into the language of OKR—which really defeats the purpose. The whole point of OKR is to help you think critically about what you’re working on, not simply find a new way to talk about it.

instead of focusing on what you intend to make, you’re setting your focus on the people you’re trying to serve

Early in my consulting career, I had a colleague who had a handful of very useful questions she turned to again and again. She called them magic questions, because they work like magic every time. These questions are my magic questions for finding outcomes.
What are the user and customer behaviors that drive business results? (This is the outcome that we’re trying to create.)
How can we get people to do more of those behaviors? (These are the features, policy changes, promotions, etc that we’ll do to try to create the outcomes.)
How do we know that we’re right? (This uncovers the dynamics of the system, as well as the tests and metrics we’ll use to measure our progress.)

It’s common to get caught in this kind of confusion—mistaking “making stuff” for making progress, and mistaking shipping features for being done.