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We’ve talked a lot in this chapter about outcomes as the measure of success for your product. One challenge we’ve observed with the teams we’ve worked with is finding the right level of granularity in determining the right outcomes to measure. To help with that, let’s look at three different measures of success:

  • Output: These are features we design, implement, and ship. As a measure of success they are very common because they are clearly visible and easy to measure (you either shipped the feature or you didn’t). What they don’t measure if value to the customer. They only capture the team’s delivery performance.
  • Outcome: This is the change in the world we hope to see after we’ve created the output. As a measure of success, these are rare primarily because they are not binary and instead operate on a sliding scale. If a team is asked to improve retention by 50% but only manages to improve it by 42%, does that mean they’ve failed? It’s not always clear.
  • Impact: These are high-level measures of business health. Most companies measure these in the form of revenue, profits, sales, Net Promoter Score, and so on. As a measure of team-level success, these are usually too high-level because it is often difficult to attribute a direct correlation between the launch of a tactical feature or a system optimization and an impact-level improvement. There are far too many factors that regularly affect these measures.

It is therefore in your best interest to ask your teams to work on outcome-level metrics. It’s at this level of granularity that teams can draw direct correlation between work they are doing and explicit changes in customer behavior.


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Changing Culture

As you implement Lean UX, consider these dimensions of culture:

  • Adopting a position of humility
  • Embracing new skills
  • Creating open, collaborative workspaces
  • No more heroes
  • Falling in love with the problem, not the solution
  • Shifting agency culture
  • Being realistic about your environment

Shifting Team Organization

To implement Lean UX, you’ll also need to rethink the way you organize teams:

  • Moving from limited roles to collaborative capabilities
  • Creating cross-functional teams
  • Creating small teams
  • Working with distributed teams
  • Working with third-party venors

Shifting Process

Finally, your product development processes will change as well:

  • Shifting from output to outcomes
  • Eliminating Big Design up front
  • Speed first, aesthetics second
  • Embracing UX debt
  • Navigating documentation standards
  • Managing up and out