1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
How to Go From Customer Problems to Outcome OKRs
How to Go From Customer Problems to Outcome OKRsDear Reader, Most teams skip the hardest part of creating OKRs: translating validated customer problems into meaningful metrics. You've done the discovery work. Your interviews revealed that drivers on your ridesharing platform struggle with shift planning—they can't predict which areas will be busy, leading to wasted time and lower earnings. But instead of jumping straight to "build demand forecasting," you need one more step: defining what behavior change would tell you the problem is actually solved. The Translation ProblemI see teams make this leap constantly: Customer problem → Solution idea → Cross fingers and hope. What's missing is asking: What would users do differently if we solved this problem well? An outcome describes a change in human behavior, not a company aspiration. "Increase driver satisfaction" is what the business wants. "Drivers spend less time in low-demand areas" describes how humans would behave differently. A Simple Structure That WorksWhen you've validated a customer problem worth solving, structure your outcome similar to what Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf suggest in their book "Who Does What By How Much?" [Specific Audience] + [Behavior Change] + [How You'll Measure It] Compare these examples: Vague: "Improve user engagement by 20%"
Clear: "Part-time drivers in suburban markets reduce unpaid waiting time from 30+ minutes per shift to under 10 minutes."
The Question That Matters MostBefore settling on any Key Result, ask yourself: "What specific metric would actually tell us we've achieved this behavior change?" This prevents you from tracking activity instead of progress. Maybe "time saved" matters more than "feature adoption rates." Maybe "successful task completion" matters more than "button clicks." The goal isn't perfect prediction. It's creating metrics that connect solving real customer problems to observable changes in how people actually behave. Did you enjoy the newsletter? Please forward it. It only takes two clicks. Creating this one took two hours. Thank you for Practicing Product, Tim The Difference the right Facilitator can bring to your Leadership OffsiteAn Offsite can be just another long meeting in a new location—or it can be the turning point where your leadership team gains clarity, alignment, and renewed energy. With Sonja Mewes as your facilitator, you experience structured analyses, authentic dialogue, and decisions everyone stands behind.
I highly recommend working with Sonja. Not only because she's my life partner, but also because I have experienced firsthand how she creates space for individuals and groups to discover their path. As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions. I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery. |
Product Practice Newsletter
1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
Product Practice #403 Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices PUBLISHED Apr 9, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, During my last webinar on Connect Strategy, Goals, and Discovery with Progress Wheel, I asked people which part of their work is most prone to Alibi Progress. Almost everyone who chimed in named OKRs. And that's because many OKR cycles start the same way for teams: Someone opens a spreadsheet, fills in three to five semi-random metrics, and picks a value that isn't...
Product Practice #402 Product Discovery forInternal Enabler Teams PUBLISHED Apr 2, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Because the customers of your product just sit three desks away, you might think you can just "talk to them." And that's precisely what often leads to the low adoption of better product practices among product teams working on internal products (also sometimes called Enabler Teams). And why, when a user has a company email address, it is likely nobody's doing discovery on...
Product Practice #401 How to Close Your Confidence Loop PUBLISHED Mar 26, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Most teams can tell you what they're building. Far fewer can tell you why it matters and how they will know it has worked. And I mean in a connected, defensible way that traces from their next release or discovery back to a company goal. That gap is where confidence lives (or doesn't). The confidence loop describes the critical questions you need to be able to answer and connect to...