When outcomes matter

Many companies I come across suffer from one or more of these problems:

1. Lack of productivity: founders, board, or other leaders feel that the development teams are not able to deliver as fast or with as much impact as they should be. This is often felt by founders as a lack of urgency.
2. Indecisive decision making: founders and leadership feel their team don’t make key decisions. Teams often feel and complain of a lack of clarity, lack of alignment or that objectives change too frequently
3. Repeating the same mistakes and same meetings over and over: founders and teams report that, in spite of their efforts, they seem to end up failing to deliver over and over again.

I’ve experienced each of these in my own startups - left unchecked they’ll suck the lifeblood out of your team, your product and cause untold damage.

What happens when you get crystal clear

Once I’ve taken startups through one or two workshops to get clear on their priorities, they tell me:

1. Their productivity and ability to execute go up.
2. Team members feel empowered to make decisions.
3. Founders, leadership, sales, marketing and product teams finally speak the same language; they’re happier, more productive and more creative.

The method I use is so powerful, about one in five times simply running one or two workshops is all the startup needed to do to align their teams and restart their growth.

Time to get crystal clear

Few people obsess about why

Most people, for most of their lives, obsess about what they do, what they eat, what they wear, what they say. Few people obsess about why. Why did I do that? Why will I do the same tomorrow? Why am I reading this article?

If you want your team to be productive, if you want them to make decisive decisions and learn from mistakes, they need to understand the big why. Why are they doing the work they’re doing? Why did this project fail?

An outcome is another word for why. One of your primary roles as a leader is to make sure your people understand why. What is the outcome we’re trying to achieve? How will we know when we’ve achieved it?

How to discover your outcomes

A typical first iteration of a list of company outcomes looks like this:

1. Release v2 of the product
2. Hire 2 SDRs
3. Meet our sales forecast

This is a jumble of to-do list outcomes, placeholders and generalities. They leave a lot of room for confusion, they tell us little about what we’re trying to achieve.

To get to outcomes, ask these questions:

• What is important about X
• When we’ve achieved Y, what will we be able to do that we’re not able to today?

Whilst why is our ultimate goal, its best to avoid why questions, as they are often interpreted as a challenge and end up shutting people down, making people defensive.

Now we’re clear on outcomes, I’ll share the steps I use to generate a stack-ranked list of company objectives that boost productivity, empower teams to perform and help everyone speak the same language.

Step #1: List your outcomes

List out the major outcomes (not outputs) your company need to achieve in the next 6-24 months.

Use what’s important about X and when we’ve achieved Y, what will we be able to do questions to interrogate the outcomes.

Step #2: Rank and reduce your outcomes

Stack rank the outcomes in order of importance (a lifeboat exercise). Be brutal. If you are pre-product-market fit, drop absolutely everything that is not essential to reaching product-market fit. If you’re not convinced, read about why you need to focus on PMF first.

As a general rule of thumb, the number of outcomes should be between 3 and 5. If you have 50-150 headcount, 5 might work. If you have 10-25 headcount, aim for 3.

This is not your company OKRs and it’s absolutely not your team’s OKRs. It’s the highest level of guidance on priorities (phrased as outcomes, outputs) that your whole company has access to.

For some help prioritising, read this article about design thinking techniques you can use to prioritise your outcomes.

Step #3: Assign key results

Assign 2-3 key results to each outcome.

Your key result is an outcome-based metric that indicates the completion of the objective.

To get to key results ask yourself:

• How will we know when we’ve achieved X?
• What would a good level/quality of completion be?
• Is there a metric that we can assign to this key result?
• Is there something we need to learn as a result of this key result?

For more guidance, read more about key results here.

Step #4: Re-order into milestones

The biggest gift you can give as a founder is extreme job clarity

Now, re-order into a set of milestones. These should be 3-5 time-ordered events (outcomes + key results) that show you and your team the sequence of events that matter to your success.

The purpose of this step is to give your team the luxury of focussing on one outcome at a time. The biggest gift you can give as a founder is extreme job clarity. This does not mean doing your team’s work for them and it definitely doesn’t mean that you just need to hire people who execute. When you get extremely clear on the results you want your team to obtain, incredible things will happen.

For more inspiration, read more about how Slack focus on getting to the next hill.

Ready to give your team the gift of extreme clarity?

Copy my worksheet and have a go for yourself.

Watch a video of me filling out a full set of company milestones.

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Photo by Israel Gil on Unsplash

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