Did you know 66% of features go unused by 80% of customers, and 80-90% of new features fail to deliver results? Growth-stage B2B SaaS companies often waste time and resources chasing features that don’t solve real customer problems or align with business goals.
Here’s the fix: Shift from a feature-first to an outcome-driven product strategy. Focus on measurable results that improve customer satisfaction, drive revenue, and align with your business objectives.
Key Takeaways:
- Features are tools, not goals: Prioritize outcomes over feature lists.
- Measure success: Track metrics like user engagement, retention, and revenue impact.
- Align teams: Use cross-functional collaboration and clear success metrics.
- Listen to customers: Focus on solving real problems – not just wishlists.
This guide will show you how to build a results-driven roadmap, align product work with your business goals, and create products that deliver real value.
Strategic Product Planning Series 2: Outcome-Based …
Key Elements of Results-Driven Products
Shifting the focus from features to outcomes is critical for creating successful products. Here’s how to make that happen.
Focus on Customer Results, Not Features
Relying solely on customer wishlists often leads to short-term fixes rather than meaningful solutions. Instead, prioritize measurable outcomes that solve real problems.
"A roadmap based primarily on customer requests is an example of a feature roadmap because it often leads to focusing on the superficial level of customer needs and wants and you create features to solve them on an incremental level."
– Becky Flint, CEO of Dragonboat
Think of features as tools to achieve broader goals. When considering new developments, ask yourself: What problem does this solve for the customer? How will we measure its success? Does it align with our business strategy?
Align Product Work with Business Goals
For product development to truly make an impact, it must align with the company’s overarching objectives. This starts with clear, actionable metrics set at the executive level.
Experts recommend focusing on no more than 5–6 key outcomes at a time. Keeping the scope narrow ensures your efforts are targeted and data-driven.
Let Data Drive Your Decisions
In a world where customer acquisition costs are rising and willingness to pay is shrinking, data is your best guide. The most effective product teams rely on strong measurement systems to track both inputs and outcomes.
Here are some metrics to watch:
- User engagement
- Feature adoption rates
- Revenue impact (ARPU, ARR, MRR)
- Customer retention
- Satisfaction scores
Consider these insights:
- Studies from Google and Bing revealed that 80–90% of features either negatively impacted or had no effect on their key metrics.
- Slack found that 70% of features aimed at monetization failed to produce positive results.
What can you do?
- Test before you build: Experiment to validate assumptions and gauge customer reactions.
- Monitor adoption metrics: Track how users interact with new features and their effect on business goals.
- Adapt based on results: Dive into the data to identify strategies that deliver the most value.
"Your prioritization method or framework needs to be highly related to the goals that matter for that specific roadmap."
– Becky Flint, CEO of Dragonboat
Creating a Results-Based Product Roadmap
To align product efforts with business goals, craft a roadmap that delivers measurable outcomes. This approach builds on the idea of connecting product work to broader business strategies.
Set Clear Success Metrics
Define metrics that reflect value delivery while addressing both customer needs and business objectives.
Focus on three main categories:
- Business Metrics: Examples include revenue growth, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value.
- User Metrics: Track engagement rates, adoption, and retention.
- Platform Metrics: Measure system performance, reliability, and scalability.
Make sure each metric is SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For instance, instead of saying "increase user engagement", aim for something like "boost daily active users by 25% by Q3 2025."
Measure Current Performance
Start by establishing baseline metrics to set achievable targets. Pay attention to key points in the user journey:
| Journey Stage | Metrics to Track |
|---|---|
| Awareness | Website traffic, demo requests, trial signups |
| Adoption | Feature usage, time-to-value, onboarding completion |
| Engagement | Daily/weekly active users, session duration |
| Retention | Churn rate, renewal rate, expansion revenue |
| Satisfaction | NPS score, customer satisfaction, support tickets |
Combine these metrics with ongoing customer insights to refine your targets and ensure they stay relevant.
Build Customer Feedback Loops
Having feedback systems in place helps validate roadmap decisions and ensures your product meets market demands.
Here’s how to gather and use feedback effectively:
1. Direct Customer Research
Conduct regular interviews and surveys to get qualitative insights. Focus on understanding the outcomes customers want, rather than just collecting feature requests.
2. Usage Analytics
Analyze how customers interact with your product. Look at adoption rates for new features and their impact on key metrics. This helps confirm whether your updates are achieving their intended goals.
3. Continuous Learning Cycles
Schedule regular checkpoints to evaluate progress. Use these reviews to:
- Assess whether current projects are improving key metrics.
- Spot gaps in delivering customer value.
- Reprioritize your roadmap as new insights emerge.
- Share findings across teams to enhance future planning.
"Product metrics are needed to track the success of the product against its goals. These metrics help to identify gaps, plan a roadmap, and guide the prioritization of the next features and enhancements." – Tarun
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Getting Teams Aligned on Outcomes
Once you have a results-driven roadmap and consistent customer insights, the next step is getting your teams on the same page. This means changing how teams collaborate and measure success.
Improve Cross-Team Communication
Strong communication between product, sales, customer success, and marketing teams is key to achieving results. Set up a clear schedule for regular meetings:
| Timeframe | Meeting Type | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Semi-annual | Strategic Planning | Align executives on company-wide OKRs |
| Quarterly | Business Review | Adjust plans based on market feedback and goals |
| Bi-weekly | Product Operations | Review metrics and roadmap progress |
| Weekly | Cross-functional Sync | Share updates between product and customer teams |
Incorporate customer insights and impact data into these meetings to keep everyone informed and aligned.
Reward Results-Focused Work
Good communication is just the start. To truly align teams, link incentives directly to customer and business outcomes. Performance reviews should focus on:
- Contributions to key business metrics
- Customer success indicators
- Learning and adapting based on data
Celebrate both successes and failures that provide valuable lessons. Share these lessons across the company to build a stronger collective understanding. When teams see their results recognized and rewarded, it reinforces this outcome-driven mindset.
Get Leadership Support
Leadership support is essential for long-term success with an outcome-focused approach. Here’s how to secure it:
Set Clear Strategic Goals
Focus on 5-6 major strategic priorities that align with company objectives. Becky Flint, CEO of Dragonboat, explains it well: "In a strategic planning session, you take the business goals (objectives) and turn them into strategic goals (key results), which provide more detail on how you plan to achieve them. This level of alignment must begin at the executive level."
Demonstrate Progress
Use clear data visualizations to show progress on key metrics like customer satisfaction and revenue growth. This keeps leadership engaged and supportive.
Enable Change Management
Appoint a senior leader to champion these changes. Equip your teams with the tools and training they need to adopt outcome-focused practices.
"There are often multiple teams involved to drive a desired business outcome. With an outcome-focused roadmapping practice, not only do you build an outcome-focused product organization, you build a collaborative organization." – Dragonboat
Regular feedback from teams and leadership check-ins will help maintain momentum as changes take hold.
Examples of Successful Outcome-Based Products
Let’s look at companies that shifted their focus from features to outcomes and achieved measurable improvements.
Success Patterns and Best Practices
Tubular Labs, a digital video analytics provider, experienced slowing growth and poor retention in early 2017. By adopting an outcome-driven approach using the Zebra methodology, they saw impressive results:
| Metric | Improvement |
|---|---|
| Average Deal Size | +44.5% |
| Revenue Growth | +257% |
| Customer Acquisition Cost | -26% |
| Client Retention | +18% |
"Zebra has transformed our approach by centering on the Voice of the Customer."
These results highlight how focusing on outcomes can drive measurable growth.
A compliance SaaS company with 200 employees tackled executive-driven decision-making by introducing data-backed strategies. Their efforts led to:
- Saving 6–8 hours per week for each product manager in gathering insights
- Cutting down quarterly roadmap planning lead time to just 2 weeks
- Ensuring 80% of roadmap decisions were backed by customer data
"Zelta shifted our process from top-heavy to democratic and data-driven, enabling quick validation of ideas and alignment with market needs."
Problems to Watch For
While the benefits of an outcome-based approach are clear, there are common challenges to be aware of:
- Executive Opinion Dominance: Product decisions often lean too heavily on senior executives rather than customer needs. To address this, integrate tools like Salesforce and Zendesk, and prioritize regular customer calls to gather actionable data.
- Measurement Gaps: Teams sometimes overlook whether new features deliver their intended impact. Avoid this by defining success metrics before development, automating tracking systems, and holding regular review sessions to assess outcomes.
- Biased Feedback Collection: Relying on feedback from a small group of users can skew priorities. Broaden feedback collection across diverse customer segments, combine insights from multiple sources, and validate findings with quantitative data.
"Feature roadmapping adopts a predefined prioritization method, not responsive to the goals and needs of the company or market. Outcome-based roadmapping adjusts priority and focus based on the business and market needs."
Striking the right balance between data and customer insights is crucial for maintaining an effective outcome-driven strategy.
Conclusion: Building an Outcome-Focused Company
Shift your approach from churning out features to delivering measurable results by aligning your strategy with business goals. With two-thirds of features going unused and 70% of monetization features underperforming, it’s clear that focusing on outcomes – not just outputs – is the way forward.
First Steps to Take Now
To start driving outcome-focused development, begin by aligning your strategy across teams. Conduct strategic planning sessions to establish company-wide OKRs and identify 5-6 key priorities that will make a meaningful impact on your business.
Here’s how successful companies make this transition:
-
Strategic Planning
Schedule semi-annual planning sessions to turn objectives into measurable key results. Use tools like SWOT analysis to identify opportunities and challenges. -
Measurement Framework
Set up a system to track how product releases affect business outcomes. Adjust your roadmap to ensure every feature delivers value. -
Cross-Team Collaboration
Hold regular meetings, such as bi-weekly operations updates and quarterly business reviews, to keep everyone aligned and focused on outcomes.
"Shipping a feature does not equal success. Changing customers’ behavior in measurable and positive ways is what leads to success." – Jason Doherty
How Zero to Ten Advisory Can Help
Need help putting these ideas into action? Zero to Ten Advisory specializes in guiding B2B SaaS companies through this transformation. Their fractional CPO services include:
- Developing product strategies that align with your business goals
- Building data-driven roadmaps focused on customer impact
- Establishing systems to measure success effectively
- Enhancing collaboration across teams
Their comprehensive approach ensures every feature ties back to your business goals, with real-time analytics dashboards to track progress and results.
"Your ultimate goal is to maximize business outcome and impact, not product release output. You can have the coolest features around, but if you’re not retaining customers, it won’t matter. Product development is about driving growth, and growth comes from customer engagement and retention – not just new features. Stay focused on what truly matters." – Shegun Otulana