How to Go From Customer Problems to Outcome OKRs

​Dear 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 Problem

I 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 Works

When 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%"

• Who exactly? Doing what differently? Why does 20% matter?

Clear: "Part-time drivers in suburban markets reduce unpaid waiting time from 30+ minutes per shift to under 10 minutes."

• Specific segment, clear behavior change, meaningful measurement

The Question That Matters Most

Before 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.

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Thank you for Practicing Product,

​Tim​

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Who is Tim Herbig?

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.