Outcome Mapping & Scrum: The Story of Amazing Decisions

(Germany)

December 10, 2019

Introduction

The purpose of Scrum is to maximize value by delivering a usable and useful Increment through Sprints. While the entire Scrum Team is accountable for creating a valuable, useful Increment, the Product Owner is also accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team.

Deciding what’s the most valuable thing to do can be difficult. The transparency of the Product Backlog is key to facilitating decision making. Outcome Mapping is a powerful technique to enhance Product Backlog transparency.

Follow us through the story of the fictional company Amazing Decisions where Kathryn, Sharon, Bruce and a Scrum Team learn about outcome mapping.

Amazing Decisions

This is Kathryn. Kathryn is the CEO of  Amazing Decisions, a company creating and selling digital products. She wants to increase revenue from sales. Kathryn has set up a meeting with her direct reports Sharon and Bruce to brainstorm ideas.

Kathryn: "We need to increase revenue, let's brainstorm ideas!"

Bruce, the VP of Sales wants to produce new widgets to increase revenue - flashier than the rest of the product range and bigger too.

Bruce: "Let's build widget 2000 and 5000. They're gonna be huge!"

Sharon, the Product Owner isn’t convinced that more widgets will lead to more revenue. Instead, she suggests to take a step back and understand which customer behavior would lead to more revenue and what the organization would have to do to encourage this behavior.

Sharon: "What's the behavior we like to see from our customers that would lead to our goal?"

Read the full story here.

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Comments (11)

Blake McMillan

08:23 pm February 11, 2020

Great article Johannes! I loved this bit toward the end:
"they defined experiments they would run to test their assumptions and avoid investing time into creating something that has no value"
That is the competitive advantage that we have as Scrum Practitioners.

Johannes Geske

07:09 pm February 25, 2020

Thanks, Blake! The beauty of an outcome map is that it makes visible the connections between goals and outputs. This way it's a lot easier to see the underlying assumptions that must be true to create value.

rik manhaeve

09:48 am September 9, 2020

Well done, but the outcomes are what matter, more revenue is a consequence, a benefit, a result.

Outcomes and goals are used many times as synonymous. Your
company will be performing better when the outcomes or goals are
reached. the change of behavior is what we want and we believe this will
result in more revenue. This difference makes met think of the
statement by Peter Drucker: a company doesn't exist to make meoney, it
exists to create customers. The better you serve your customers, the
more value you give them, the more revenue you may get. As Warren Buffet
said: "Price is what you pay, value is what you get". So the price paid
becomes revenue, but only if the customer thinks it is worthwhile, he
will pay. The 'customer experience' is the goal, the revenue is the
benefit coming from it. So outcomes are essential to get the benefits.

Johannes Geske

02:57 pm September 9, 2020

In this model, the meaning of "outcome" is different to your understanding. "Outcome" describes a change in behavior of a person that leads to a desired end. We chose to call this end "goal" as this is a widely understood and accepted term in most organizations.

Juan Mejías

08:53 pm September 23, 2020

I knew this as Impact mapping, with GOAL-ACTORS-IMPACT-DELIVERABLES in place of GOAL-PLAYERS-OUTCOMES-OUTPUTS

Saurabh Sharma

04:12 pm December 20, 2020

True indeed. In coming up with next set of features and products, we tend to lose sight of the "problem" we are trying to solve. Outcome mapping model can keep us grounded just like Bruce who initially thought widget 5000 and 2000 were worth creating next!

Ricardo Galindo

02:24 pm February 11, 2021

Great article, specially the message about value assumptions and how to use that to groom the product backlog. To me, the term "outcome" is more goal oriented than "impact" and gives the exercise a lot more sense.

Narayann Swaami

02:14 pm January 22, 2022

This is fantastic and made for great reading. I am sure to run it by the product owners I coach!

Narayann Swaami

02:15 pm January 22, 2022

As I understand, it is more "mapped" to EBM constructs of Goal, Activities, Outputs and Outcomes

Johannes Geske

01:43 pm January 23, 2022

Thank you, Narayann! Let me know what your Product Owners think.

InfiniteMonkey

04:40 pm May 19, 2022

This was awesome!
Thank you for the insights.