First, what is the difference between outcomes and outputs?
Both are important, but an agile team should focus on the outcome and not believe that particular outputs are the best way of solving the problem. While progressing towards a goal, working outputs should provide real value to customers along the way (and we’ll get onto that later!).
Co-design a Clear Vision for Success With Your Team
We all need to know where we’re heading. However, doing and being agile is not an excuse to avoid planning. This concept means it’s essential to set a compelling team goal or outcome. But then the team must adapt and learn how best to reach that outcome in a way that delivers maximum value as early as possible.
As part of setting a compelling vision, it’s important to have ambitious goals and challenge yourself to break open your existing assumptions. One way of doing this is adopting a “10x mindset.”
One of Google’s 9 innovation principles is to “think 10x, not 10 percent.” This means striving to improve something tenfold rather than just incrementally. Asking yourself, “What is the 10x version of this idea?” forces you to reinvent or focus on revolutionary change rather than just marginal or evolutionary improvements.
Google has also called this “moonshot thinking,” referring to John F. Kennedy’s ambitions to put a man on the moon. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Watch this video about moonshot thinking to get a better understanding of this concept.
Incrementally improving things can be very useful in optimizing outcomes or results. But sometimes, you must have bigger ideas that challenge existing ways of doing things, and a 10x mindset is a way to encourage breakthrough ideas alongside those that drive smaller gains.
What might be a 10x idea for your team or business? Reflect on this in your log book.
Define a Compelling and Directional Outcome
Agile ways of working require you to put the customer first and define a compelling vision to give direction. It can help to articulate a goal or ambition in a way that balances customer needs with the benefit to the business. Expressing a team’s mission or outcome they want to achieve in a concise one or two-sentence vision that everyone can align around can also help.
A team focused on building a new product or service might use this simple template to create its mission:
“Our product helps [customer persona] to do [customer goal] by [how it works and how that’s different]. We make money or drive value by [business benefit].”
The founders of Airbnb could have articulated their mission as:
“Airbnb helps travelers find and book the best accommodations possible by showing them interesting and different options for places to stay that are not hotels. Airbnb makes money by a commission from hosts and customers.”
Articulating a mission helps the team focus on a clear outcome that is compelling enough to give direction while also being flexible enough to adapt and learn how best to achieve this goal.
What might an example mission be for your team or business? Write the answer in the corresponding section of the log book.
Balance Vision With Iteration
Teams can easily become invested in one way of solving a problem because it has worked before, or they believe it presents the best solution. The more time and effort the team puts into solving the problem this way, the more it wants to prove it is right. The pattern makes the team less adaptable. Psychologists call this “path dependency.” You can find out more about this concept in this video.
While drawing on experience can help teams, it is also important they embrace change and stay open to new ideas—even at a late stage in a process. The best way to achieve this is to focus on an outcome and not fixate on a specific solution.
Focus on Working Outputs
One of the four key agile principles created as part of the Agile Manifesto is: Working outputs over comprehensive inputs.
This principle means that teams should focus on delivering working outputs and value to the customer as early as possible and then regularly throughout the process. Of course, documentation and reporting can be crucial in businesses. However, the objective of an agile team is to minimize unnecessary work up front and show working outputs to stakeholders in the business.
Regularly showing working outputs to stakeholders in the business to get feedback and input can also help the team reprioritize regularly. Bringing stakeholders along the development journey with the team ensures they feel included. It also avoids risking a “big reveal” at the end of a project where outputs don’t align with expectations. In some Agile methods, these stakeholder sessions are called “demos” since they show working prototypes or outputs rather than reporting on or presenting them.
Let’s Recap!
Defining a clear mission and confirming members agree on achieving it will ensure your team stays focused on outcomes.
Make sure the team's vision statement incorporates customer needs and the value it will generate for the business.
Use a 10x mindset to challenge your thinking and break away from existing assumptions. It can help to set ambitious goals.
Stay adaptive and flexible in how the team achieves its goals.
Embrace change, even late in an Agile process, and aim to deliver working outputs early and often. Show working outputs to stakeholders for their input, and take an inclusive approach to development.
In this chapter, you explored ways of ensuring your team is focused on the outcomes. Now let’s see how to ensure they stay agile and don’t drift back to linear ways of working.
