97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 22. Mind Your Outcomes. Pay Attention to Value.

Jeff Patton

Focus on Outcome

Think of a product you use—one you’d tell others about. What makes that product good, great even? I’m pretty sure you’ll say things like it’s easy to use, it solves a problem, it’s fun to use, or it makes money. Notice how the things you thought of are the benefits to you as a customer of the product, or maybe even the financial benefits to the company that funded the product.

Notice how you didn’t think delivered on time or delivered under budget or created happy stakeholders. That’s because those aren’t product success factors; they’re project success factors.

Being more product-centric means you’ll need to focus on and measure what your customers and users do after you deliver them what you built. We hope they see it, try it, really use it, keep using it, and hopefully say good things about it. Those are the outcomes because they are what happens after you release. And if customers and users do those things, that usually results in some impact for the organization that paid for the product to be built—for example, return on investment, increases in market share, or cost savings for things built for internal use.

Bad Scrum Focuses on Output

Well-intentioned people using Scrum can easily lose sight of outcome and impact. It’s easy just to focus on the output in Scrum. We start each Sprint ...