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 #426 You don’t need toinvestigate every problem PUBLISHED Sep 18, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Discovery without direction leads to endless exploration. Teams can feel overwhelmed, believing they must investigate every problem. Your strategic audience choices determine which customer feedback deserves priority investigation, while discovery insights reveal whether your strategic assumptions about customer problems and competitive positioning hold up in practice. This...
Product Practice #425 What Part of YouIs Making the Decision? PUBLISHED Sep 11, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, For much of my career, I’ve helped product teams work through uncertainty. Chilling with my buddy King Arthur at Tintagel Castle I challenged assumptions, introduced frameworks, and helped people make better decisions when there was no obvious answer. While I still love doing that work, I’ve become increasingly interested in a deeper question over the past six years: From where...
Product Practice #424 Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices PUBLISHED Sep 4, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, “Let’s prioritize by value.” Value for whom? That was the question I explored in last week's essay Business Value, Customer Value, and Team Value Are Different Arguments. Today, let's demystify the term value even further. Nothing is inherently valuable. The same opportunity can have different value under different strategies. For that narrative to check out, we need...