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Product Practice Newsletter

How to Go From Customer Problems to Outcome OKRs

Published about 2 months ago • 3 min read

How to Go From Customer Problems to Outcome OKRs

READ ON

​HERBIG.CO​

PUBLISHED

Sep 5, 2025

READING TIME

5 min & 18 sec

​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.

1 Question For You To Put This Into Practice

Look at your current Key Results. For each one, can you name the specific customer problem it's designed to solve and the exact behavior change it measures?

Reply and let me know your answer.

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Thank you for Practicing Product,

​Tim​

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Content I found Practical This Week

Why Your OKRs Are Broken

The uncomfortable truth is that most organisations are trying to copy-paste Google's approach without understanding that OKRs aren't a rigid framework but a philosophy that must adapt to your specific context. We've confused the map for the territory, mistaking one company's implementation for universal truth. The result? Elaborate to-do lists masquerading as strategic objectives, cascading confusion instead of alignment, and teams going through the motions without achieving meaningful outcomes.

OKR Top Tips

OKRs shouldn’t cover everything your business does — aside from being an annoying exercise, it entirely defeats the purpose if you codify the business into 10s or 100s of OKRs and remove the oh-so-important point of FOCUS. The Corporate IT team does not need an OKR on provisioning laptops to employees! As I stated above, OKRs should be about the new outcomes you want to achieve vs the stuff you already do.

Our Half-Baked Adoption of OKRs

A symptom of a half-baked OKR adoption is creating key results but continuing to focus more on roadmaps with deadlines. Adopting OKRs requires adopting uncertainty into company culture. But uncertainty is often unacceptable to company leaders. To avoid uncertainty, companies usually keep their existing processes and layer OKRs on top. Unfortunately, roadmaps with deadlines and achieving key results are not compatible. Leaders will still spend most of their time monitoring progress to launch (output) instead of progress to the key result (outcome). Teams, when given a deadline, will choose to hit that deadline. It’s much safer to say: “We hit the deadline” than…“We are delaying the launch to build the feature we think will achieve the key result.”

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.

Product Practice Newsletter

Turn Product Theory into Pragmatic Application by Tim Herbig

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

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