Lean UX, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3. Outcomes

Traditionally, software projects are framed by requirements and deliverables. Teams are given requirements and are expected to create deliverables. These deliverables will describe systems, features, and technology that will satisfy those requirements. In many cases, requirements arrive without strategic context. Why are we doing this? For whom? What does success look like?

Lean UX radically shifts the way we frame our work by introducing back the strategic context for our feature and design choices and, more important, how we—the entire team, not just the design department—define success. Our goal is not to create a deliverable or a feature: it’s to positively affect customer behavior or change in the world—to create an outcome.

What Business Are We In?

Lean UX means getting out of the deliverables business. We’re in the business of creating outcomes. We must focus less on the stuff we make—the documentation and mock-ups and prototypes, the features and pages and buttons—and more on generating results. To do that, we focus on only making things that generate the outcomes that we want.

Why focus on outcomes instead of features and deliverables? It’s because we’ve learned that it’s hard—and in many cases impossible—to predict whether the features we design and build will create the value we want to create. Will this button encourage people to purchase? Will this feature create more engagement? Will people use this feature in ways we didn’t predict? Will we ...