Should product teams be measured primarily by customer/business outcomes or by shipped output?
4 recorded positions from 4 people, first said Dec 7, 2022. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.
Customer outcome goals beat output and revenue goals
Marty Cagan · Dec 7, 2022
The real difference between a feature and a product is output versus outcomes: a product solves problems for real people and for the company, whereas features are just output
Companies can crank out features faster than ever yet the share of products that do better isn't rising — so shipping features isn't what produces results; 'feature factories' optimize for the wrong thing
Scope: definitions based on level of effort are superficial and unhelpful
16:42 20 Product: Marty Cagan on The Four Questions of Great Product Management, Product Lessons from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and eBay's Pierre Omidyar & The Difference Between Truly Great Product Teams and the Rest
Aman Narang · Aug 21, 2024
Metrics and scorecards matter, but the primary job is making customers successful and the metrics follow from that
Sitting in front of a scorecard telling people to do better isn't helpful; like in sales, the data supports but doesn't drive the work
Scope: still endorses this view today
18:17 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast
Mike Hudack · Sep 13, 2024
Product teams should be held to clear outcome-based goals rather than ship goals, and customer-outcome goals (satisfaction, customers' own sales) beat revenue goals — a 10% customer-outcome goal often produces a 20% revenue increase.
The attitude that the team is building a thing to serve a person or group of people on the other side is unbelievably important.
10:37 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack
Also on the record
Harry Stebbings · Dec 7, 2022 · hedged
The biggest problem founders make is building features rather than products, which undermines whether the thing is valuable enough to switch for
A single feature isn't enough for a customer to switch off an existing solution — he sees this especially in people management tools
16:19 Building single features not full products fails to earn customer switching
Your assistant can query this graph directly — 4 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.