The Challenge of Driving Outcomes

Most product trios don’t have a lot of experience with driving outcomes. They grew up in a world where they were told what to build. Or they were asked to generate outputs, with little thought for what impact those outputs had. So, when we shift from an output mindset to an outcome mindset, we have to relearn how to do our jobs.

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as talking to customers every week. That’s a good start. But we also need to consider the rest of our continuous-discovery definition:

I’ve met many teams who are good at talking to customers. But they forget that the purpose of these customer touchpoints is to conduct research in pursuit of a desired outcome. Those last two lines of the definition are critical. We aren’t doing research for research’s sake. We are doing research so that we can serve our customers in a way that creates value for our business.

Finding the best path to your desired outcome is what researchers call an “ill-structured problem”—also commonly called a “wicked problem.” Ill-structured problems are defined by having many solutions. There are no right or wrong answers, only better or worse ones. Much of the work when tackling an ill-structured problem is framing the problem itself.⁵ How we frame a problem has a big impact on how we might solve it. For example, in the Wells Fargo story, their leadership, whether implicitly or explicitly, had framed the problem as “grow customer accounts at all costs.” This framing opened the door to cheating. If, on the other hand, Wells Fargo had framed the problem as “create customers who want to open more accounts,” bankers would have been less likely to cheat.

If product trios tasked with delivering a desired outcome want to pursue business value by creating customer value, they’ll need to work to frame the problem in a customer-centric way. They’ll need to discover the customer needs, pain points, and desires that, if addressed, would drive their business outcome. For example, if Wells Fargo had learned what inspired customers to open new accounts, they might have found a customer-centric way to reach their outcome.

In this book, I’ll refer to customer needs, pain points, and desires collectively as “opportunities”—they represent opportunities to intervene in our customers’ lives in a positive way. Why don’t we call them “problems to solve”? In the product world, we don’t just solve customer problems. The word “problem” implies something needs fixing. However, we have many examples of products or services that don’t fix problems. Disneyland entertains me. Ice cream is delicious. Mountain biking is fun. These products address my desires. I could try to shoehorn these desires into needs—I need something to fill my time, I need nutrients, and I need exercise. However, writing a book, eating spinach, and going to the gym might be more effective ways of addressing those needs. The key difference here is that I enjoy Disneyland, ice cream, and mountain biking. These products were designed to address my desires, not solve my problems. So, to make sure this model is more inclusive of such products, I’ll use opportunities to represent customer needs, pain points, and desires collectively and the opportunity space to represent the problem space as well as the desire space.

To reach their desired outcome, a product trio must discover and explore the opportunity space. The opportunity space, however, is infinite. This is precisely what makes reaching our desired outcome an ill-structured problem. How the team defines and structures the opportunity space is exactly how they give structure to the ill-structured problem of reaching their desired outcome. David Jonassen, an educational psychologist from the University of Missouri, studied ill-structured problem-solving and highlights the importance of problem framing. How we frame an ill-structured problem impacts how we might solve it. Additionally, Jonassen suggests that we can’t simply start with one framing. Instead, he argues, good problem-solvers try out many framings, exploring how each impacts the solution space.⁶

The implication for product trios is that two of the most important steps for reaching our desired outcome are first, how we map out and structure the opportunity space, and second, how we select which opportunities to pursue. Unfortunately, many product trios skip these steps altogether. They start with an outcome and simply start generating ideas. We do have to get to solutions—shipping code is how we ship value to our customers and create value for our business. But the right problem framing will help to ensure that we explore and ultimately ship better solutions.