Why Outcomes Based Product Management is Not Always All It’s Cracked Up to Be

Managing for outcomes is popular now. It has plenty of amazing virtues. But it has it’s weaknesses too.

Imagine this scenario:

• Your CEO tells you to increase engagement 20% this quarter.
• But why 20%? That’s just an arbitrary number.
• And why this quarter? That’s just waterfall planning.

So why don’t we at least cut the BS and say we’ll try to engagement as high as possible as fast as possible?

But that’s a pretty crumby goal. It’s not specific or measurable.

Don’t even start on asking why increasing engagement is the most important thing we can do right now.

Switching to an outcome based approach is refreshing after being stuck an outputs based approach. But do it for a year or two and it starts to wear on you.

What teams really need is a strategy they believe in. Managing by the numbers is not a replacement for strategy and vision.