Tracking Strategic Outcomes
Tracking Strategic Outcomes involves systematically monitoring and evaluating the results of strategic initiatives against defined goals to ensure alignment with the overall product vision and business objectives.
Purpose
The purpose is to provide ongoing visibility into the effectiveness of the strategy, facilitating timely adjustments and ensuring resources are optimally allocated towards achieving key outcomes.
- Alignment: Maintains strategic alignment across teams and initiatives.
- Adaptability: Enables quick response to changes in market conditions or performance insights.
- Accountability: Establishes clear accountability for achieving strategic goals.
- Evidence-Based Decision Making: Supports decisions with data and insights derived from outcome tracking.
Context
Industry Context
A strategy is a guess about the future, and tracking strategic outcomes is the process of validating or invalidating that guess. In rapidly evolving industries, the ability to adapt and pivot based on real-time feedback is essential for staying competitive.
ZeroBlockers Context
Stream Teams are indirectly responsible for achieving the strategic objectives. The reason I say indirectly is because the Product Team creates a mapping between the strategic goals and product usage metrics that it believes will deliver on the strategic goals. The Stream Teams are then tracked against these product usage metrics. The risk is that the assumptions about correlation between the product usage metrics and the strategic goals may be incorrect. Therefore the Product Team needs to monitor the outcomes of these initiatives to ensure they are on track to achieve the desired results.
Methods
| Method | Description | Benefits | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maintaining the Product Roadmap | Collating a single overview of the work taking place on the product, based on the Kanban Boards of the Stream Teams. | Ensures transparency of all ongoing work. | Weekly |
| Automatic Strategy Contest | An automated process to allow any team member to propose a change to the strategic objectives if the team fails to deliver on the current objectives. | Ensures that the strategic approach is continuously reviewed and adjusted. | If strategy fails for 3 or more quarters |
Anti-patterns
- Set and Forget: Creating strategic plans without mechanisms for regular review and adjustment.
- Misaligned Metrics: Utilising metrics that do not directly correlate with strategic objectives, leading to misdirected efforts.
- Overemphasis on Short-term Wins: Focusing too narrowly on immediate results at the expense of long-term strategic goals.
- Siloed Tracking: Failure to integrate outcome tracking across different areas of the business, leading to disjointed efforts and insights.
- Ignoring Qualitative Insights: Over-reliance on quantitative metrics without considering the value of qualitative feedback and insights.
Case Studies
Tracking Strategic Outcomes Through Weekly Business Reviews at Amazon
How Amazon uses the Weekly Business Review (WBR) process to track and manage strategic outcomes effectively within a structure of empowered teams, ensuring alignment with long-term business goals.
Amazon
Outcomes over Outputs
How WorldRemit shifted from being reactive to implementing a product strategy that enabled innovation and high-impact outcomes.
WorldRemit