View source for Outcome is the primary measure of success

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== Description ==
Product leadership (the Product Owner) and organisational leadership should focus on tracking and measuring outcomes in order to achieve Product and Business goals. Assessing and understanding what impact the product is achieving, customer behaviour changes, and product usage, with meaningful measures that illustrate progress towards business and product outcomes.

==Rationale==
This principle is moving the emphasis from measuring team(s) output to measuring the impact of their collective efforts against business value indicators.

Whilst the output and throughput of teams may also give an indication of the progress towards business and product outcomes, it should not be the primary focus.

Output not contributing to an outcome is, effectively, waste and should be avoided by focusing effort towards maximising outcomes. At increased scale and complexity, there is a greater probability of non-value-adding work and outputs.

The old saying - "You get what you measure" - is a fundamental truth when observing human behaviour motivation. If you measure and recognise output, that's precisely what you get. Worse, if you measure at a team level, then you will drive team-centric behaviours that work against the greater interests of the overall product group.

Measuring and recognising long-term sustained and balanced outcomes achieved provides a focus and motivation for collaborative behaviours and continuous improvement of the whole value stream. "Balanced outcomes" consider multiple perspectives or criteria that may be in contention. For instance, we may have an aim to increase the number of customers signing up for an offer, but we might want to balance that with an aim to retain margin. Another example could be an aim to reduce the cost of operation of our platform, and we might balance this against an aim to maintain the customer experience and satisfaction.

==Related Principles==
*[[Minimum Viable Product Owners]]
*[[Minimise unnecessary complexity]]
*[[Each team "sees" exactly one Product Owner]]
*[[Organise around value streams]]
*[[End-to-End Product]]