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 #383 When to recognizeYour OKR Planning takes too long READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Nov 6, 2025 READING TIME 5 min & 37 sec Dear Reader, It's week three of Q4 planning. Your team has revised the OKRs five times. Leadership wants one more alignment session. The quarter starts in a week, but you haven't actually begun working toward the goals yet. The moment you're tweaking wording instead of committing to a strategic goal, you've crossed from Real Progress into Alibi Progress....
Product Practice #382 Discovery Activitiesover The Discovery READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Oct 30, 2025 READING TIME 3 min & 52 sec Dear Reader, Most teams treat Discovery like a season: "We'll do Discovery for Q1, then build in Q2." This creates a problem. It separates learning from building, makes stakeholders impatient, and turns Discovery into something you have to defend rather than a practical way to reduce uncertainty. The real question isn't "Are we doing Discovery?" It's "Are we...
Product Practice #381 How to ConnectNorth Star Metrics and OKRs READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Oct 23, 2025 READING TIME 5 min & 25 sec Dear Reader, I once worked with a team whose OKRs read like a best of every company's KPI dashboard: user engagement up 15%, conversion rate improved by 10%, feature adoption increased by 20%. When I asked how these connected to the specific intentions they want to pursue to drive long-term customer and business value, they couldn't link them. Their OKRs looked...