Target Outcome
In Kosh's first planning meeting, the goals on the whiteboard read: "more daily opens", "higher engagement", "users love the app". Six months later the app is opened daily and rated highly — and most users still have no savings. The team hit every goal except the one that mattered, because they never wrote it down.
The rule
Define the change in users' lives, not the activity in your app.
The target outcome is the real-world change the product exists to create. It sits outside the app: money actually saved, a skill actually learned, a medicine actually taken. App activity — opens, clicks, time spent — can help produce it, but it is not the outcome. A product can be busy and useless at once.
A well-defined outcome answers:
- Who changes? Kosh's users.
- What changes? They hold an emergency fund.
- How much, by when? Three months of essential expenses within 18 months of joining.
- How will we know? Emergency pot balance compared with the monthly expenses each user entered.
Two cautions. First, the outcome is not the company's revenue goal — though the two must be compatible, or the business will quietly pull against the users. Second, it must be something the product can plausibly influence. "Users become financially free" is admirable but too distant to design for or measure.
Everything later in this course hangs from this: the actor, the action and every design choice exist to move this one outcome.
The shortcut
Climb the "so that" ladder. Start from any feature or metric and keep asking "so that…?" until you reach a change in the real world that users care about. Stop there, then make it measurable.
Start at the metric
"Users open Kosh every day."
The trap is stopping on the first rung. "Daily opens" is easy to measure, so it quietly becomes the goal, and the team starts optimising notifications instead of savings.
Drills
Answer fast — trust the rule.
Which is a target outcome rather than an app activity metric?
What is wrong with "Increase daily active users by 20%" as a target outcome?
Which version of Kosh's outcome is measurable?
On the "so that" ladder, where should you stop climbing?
Remember
- Define the change in users' lives, not the activity in your app.
- Shortcut: climb the "so that" ladder to a real-world change, then make it measurable.
- Trap: stopping at an easy app metric and optimising for it.