Shifting from Effort to Outcomes (Quick Tip)
Shifting the mindset from engineering effort into business outcome can be done botton-up.
Shifting the mindset from engineering effort into business outcome can be done botton-up. For the problem you work on, try to understand:
What's the intended outcome?
How can success be observed/measured?
After that, mentally let go of the output you were working on. (This detachment could be hard.) Instead, look into the measure and try to identify the best opportunities to achieve success. Choose the best opportunity and execute it. Afterwards, validate if the opportunity has moved the measure as intended.
Going through these steps, you might run into issues, such as:
There are multiple outcomes we are after, which one to choose?
How to measure something intangible?
What if the opportunity will positively impact one metric, but negatively impact another metric?
We currently don't have anything to measure this or see where the opportunities are.
The measures are out of our team's control.
Is this outcome something we want to focus on right now?
This newly gained unclarity is valuable. You have just turned unknown unknown into a known unknown.
I have found these steps to be generally applicable, from low-level engineering work to higher-level business decisions.
