Outcome Driven Engineering Explained

What changes when you stop giving an engineering team features to deliver and instead give them an outcome to achieve?

In this episode of The Product Engineering Podcast, James explores Outcome-Driven Engineering: an operating model where product managers and engineers share accountability for creating measurable product impact.

Rather than starting with a predetermined solution, an outcome-driven team starts with the change it wants to see in customer behaviour or the product. The team then works together to understand the problem, decide how success will be measured, experiment with possible interventions and learn from the results.

In this episode

• What an outcome actually means in Product Engineering
• The difference between delivering a feature and delivering an outcome
• Examples including basket abandonment, product engagement and feature adoption
• Why Product Engineering is a cross-functional team model, not simply a job title
• How product managers and engineers retain different skills while sharing the same measure of success
• Why individual engineering metrics shouldn't replace team-level outcome accountability
• How an outcome-driven team moves from an outcome to measurement, experimentation and delivery
• Why you should decide how you'll measure success before you build
• Using prototypes and small interventions to test ideas quickly
• How learning can cause a team to refine, change or even abandon its original outcome
• Why shipping software is only part of the job — the real question is whether anything changed

The central idea is simple: instead of asking a Product Engineering team “What did you ship?”, ask them “Did you drive the outcome?”

Next episode: Accountability — how to create an accountability structure that matches the kind of work a Product Engineering team is doing.

Find out more at doproductengineering.com.