“What outcome are you ultimately trying to achieve?”
From Tony Ulwick · Author of What Customers Want; creator of Outcome-Driven Innovation
Why it works
Ulwick's Outcome-Driven Innovation rests on one premise: customers buy products to get a job done, and they evaluate every option by how well it moves the metrics they use to measure success at each step of that job. Feature requests are the customer's guess at a solution; the desired outcome is the thing they're really optimizing — speed, certainty, fewer errors, less wasted effort. Asking for the outcome rather than the feature gets you a stable, measurable target that doesn't change every time a new tool appears, which is exactly what you can prioritize and innovate against.
When to ask
When you're trying to understand what success actually looks like for a user before you design or prioritize anything. Reach for it the moment a conversation fills up with feature requests — it pulls the discussion back to the result the user is measuring themselves against.
Good follow-ups
- How do you measure whether that worked — what would tell you it went well?
- Where in the process does that outcome matter most to you?
- What gets in the way of achieving it today?
Watch out for
Users answer with a solution ('I want a bulk-export button'), not an outcome. That's not failure — it's the raw material. Convert it: 'And if that worked perfectly, what would it let you achieve?' until you reach a measurable end result. The opposite failure is accepting a vague 'I want it to be better' — push for the direction and the unit ('better how — faster? fewer steps? more accurate?').
Where to ask
- Long-form surveygreat
Outcome-Driven Innovation is natively a survey instrument — desired-outcome statements are written to be rated for importance and satisfaction at scale, so an emailed survey is where this question does its real quantitative work.
- In-product surveygreat
Strong in-product when you want the success metric behind a workflow; ask right after the user finishes the job so the outcome they were chasing is still concrete.
- User interviewworkable
Workable live, but spoken answers drift to features and solutions; you have to keep redirecting to the measurable end result ('faster', 'fewer errors', 'more certain') rather than the tool they imagine.
Stage: Stick · A question popularized by Tony Ulwick
Source: https://anthonyulwick.com/outcome-driven-innovation/