“What does success look like for you?”
From Lincoln Murphy · Customer success consultant; co-author of Customer Success (Wiley, 2016)
Why it works
Murphy's whole framing — Desired Outcome equals Required Outcome plus Appropriate Experience — only works if you actually know what success looks like to this customer, in their words. The open form is deliberate: it forces a strategic answer ('our team has shipped on the new workflow', 'we've cut onboarding time in half') rather than a feature checklist, and gives you something concrete to push on for unit, threshold, and timeframe. Without that picture, customer success becomes a treadmill of feature requests and QBRs against goals that were never agreed; with it, every conversation has a quiet reference point both sides can point at.
When to ask
At the start of a relationship — kickoff call, onboarding interview, first review — and again every couple of quarters as their world changes. Pulling success out of the customer's head and into their own words turns it from a vibe into something you can be measured against.
Good follow-ups
- In how much time — 3 months, 6 months, a year?
- What would you actually be doing differently if that came true?
- Who else on your side has to agree that's what success looks like?
- What's the most likely thing that gets in the way of that?
Watch out for
Accepting 'we want to grow' or 'we want to be more efficient'. That's a direction, not a destination. Push once for the unit and the threshold ('grow what, by how much, by when?') — if the customer can't answer, that itself is the finding: they don't have a sharp picture of success, and your product is being measured against a moving target you can't hit. Equally, don't write down your version of their answer; the value is their words, not yours.
Where to ask
- User interviewgreat
Native habitat — a forward success vision is the kind of answer that needs follow-up, redirection, and silence to land; Murphy's whole 'desired outcome' frame is built around live discovery, not a form.
- In-product surveyworkable
Workable as a kickoff or onboarding question with a reworded prompt, but expect short, generic answers — most users won't type the strategic answer you'd hear in a call.
Reworded for this context: “What would have to be true in 6 months for you to call this a clear win?”
- Long-form surveypoor
Open-ended forward-looking questions in an emailed survey collect aspirational fluff; without a moderator to push back on 'better outcomes', the answers won't be actionable.
Stage: Engagement · A question popularized by Lincoln Murphy
Source: https://sixteenventures.com/discover-desired-outcome