Outcomes (aka Key Results)

What is an Outcome?

Outcomes (aka Key Results) are the changes in human behavior your team is actively working to create. Outcome cards in Vistaly are how you communicate that effort and track that progress.

Outcomes are not to be confused with KPIs, which peristently track how the business is performing regardless of whether or not you’re actively working to improve them.

KPIs continuously track what the value of some important metric is. Outcomes are your team’s active effort to improve it.

Here are some examples what “good” Outcomes look like:

  • Dropbox example: Increase the percentage of new signups that install the Dropbox client from 45% to 55%
  • New Relic example: Reduce the average time from outage detection to devops team acknowledgment to 3 minutes
  • Slack example: Increase the average number of messages sent by new users in their first week by 20%

Business vs Product Outcomes

In the KPIs article, we talked about how there are two categories:

  • Business KPIs - higher level, lagging metrics that measure how the business is doing (e.g. ARR, new customers, % of new trials that convert to paid)
  • Product KPIs - leading metrics that measure the customer behaviors that drive business results (e.g. % of customers that do [some action] within 3 days of signing up, avg. time it takes customers to complete [some process])

You can think of Outcomes in the same way:

  • Business Outcomes are an active effort by your team to improve a Business KPI
  • Product Outcomes are an active effort by your team to improve a Product KPI

Ways people use Outcomes incorrectly

Creating output oriented Outcomes like…

“Launch the new mobile app.”

This is a bad Outcome because it measures an output rather than the desired impact or change in customer behavior that signifies actual success.

A better Outcome would be something like “Increase DAU by 30% within three months of launching the new mobile app” — it focuses on the change on customer behavior rather than just shipping something.

Creating too many Outcomes

“Priorities” is an oxymoron. When everything is important, nothing is.

When you spread your focus across too many different areas, you hinder your teams ability to focus on the things that truly matter.

When teams are constantly switching focuses, they end up little progress on any of the Outcomes at all.

Err on the side of fewer Outcomes.

Using Outcomes in Vistaly

Remember, Outcomes are used to reflect your team’s active effort to improve a given KPI. Outcomes have the following fields to enable this:

  • Start: the starting value of the KPI when you committed to improving it
  • Target: the value you’re attempting to get the KPI to
  • Value: the current value of the KPI you’re trying to move
  • Unit: the units that these values are in

For example, if the Outcome were…

Increase the % of free trial signups that invite at least 1 colleague by 50%

Then the Start might be 5, the Target would then be 7.5, the Value would be somewhere between 5 and 7.5, and the Unit would be %.

Outcome Status

Each Outcome also contains a Status field. This field indicates if the Outcome is progressing, on-track, or at-risk.

Outcomes are grouped by Status in the Reports view.