Product Owners, take note! Product demos can be a great chance to show off your work, get feedback, and celebrate your team’s successes. On the other hand, they can turn out to be a painful way to show off features that don’t quite work, leaving stakeholders disappointed and wondering where the product is going.
As a Scrum Product Owner, it’s your job to make sure that your product demos fit into the first group. It’s not enough to just show what you’ve built; you’ll need to show value and proof that your team is building the right thing. Prioritizing business outcomes over team output and continuously discovering new products and customers as part of your growth process is the secret to success.
In this post, we’ll break down the concept of outcome over output for Scrum Product Owners. You’ll learn how to make sure your product demo delivers value to stakeholders with actionable strategies like validating backlog items before they’re built.
Outcome vs Output in Product Demos
A lot of product demos fail because they only show outputs that don’t directly drive business or customer outcomes. The team is happy to show off the new buttons, the improved form, or the search algorithm that works better now. These may look great on paper, but they don’t always connect with stakeholders in a useful way. Why? Not just benefits, but also results are important to stakeholders.
Here are a few examples of what a demo that is driven by output might sound like:
- “We built a new and improved user profile page!”
- “We put the new search filters into action!”
- “We redesigned the payment gateway!”
These sentences talk about “what” was built, but not “why” it’s important. What does the brand-new bio page fix? How do the new search options make things better for users? What effect does the improved payment gateway have on business goals? If you don’t answer these questions, your demo is likely to leave stakeholders feeling uninspired and distant.
On the other hand, an outcome-driven demo is all about how the work will affect people. It explains how the new features are helping real people and making the business more valuable.
This is what an outcome-driven demo might sound like:
- “Since we added the new user profile page, user engagement has gone up by 20% because customers can now easily tailor their experience to their needs.”
- “The updated search filters have cut the average search time by 15%, which has caused conversion rates to rise by 10%.”
- “The refactored payment gateway has cut the number of failed transactions by 5%, which has led to a big rise in revenue.”
Do you see the difference? These sentences talk about the work’s effects instead of just the work itself. They show that you understand both the user’s needs and the business’s goals, and they show how the team’s work is directly helping to reach those goals. In the next section, we’ll talk about the steps you can take to move toward outcome-driven development.
How to Get Started With Outcome-Driven Development
So, how do you move from output to outcome? Adding continuous product and customer discovery to your Scrum method is the key to success. This means that, before you even start writing code, you should talk to users and stakeholders to find out what they want, make sure your ideas are correct, and confirm you’re building the right thing.
It’s easy to combine Product/Customer Discovery if you follow these nine steps:
- Set clear goals and KPIs
- Do user research regularly
- Make user personas
- Map the customer journey
- Order backlog items
- Test your assumptions
- Make changes from feedback
- Write user stories
- Continue to update your backlog
Now, let’s dive into each of these steps in more detail so you can apply them to your Scrum method.
1. Set Clear Goals and KPIs
Make sure you know what you want your product to do and how you’ll know if it’s done before you start developing it. How do you want to reach your goal? How will you know if you’re going in the right direction? Set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals and KPIs to help you with your growth.
2. Do User Research Regularly
Use polls, interviews, and usability tests with users to find out what they want, need, and are having trouble with. How could their lives be better? Talk to your customers and use this knowledge to find ways to make things better and come up with ideas for new products.
3. Make User Personas
Make detailed user personas that represent your target audience based on the study you did on users. The demographics, motivations, goals, and actions of these personas should all be included. Well-defined personas will help you understand your users better and make better choices about your products.
4. Map the Customer Journey
Figure out what your customers do when they use your product. Along the way, look for possible pain points and ways to make things better. This will help you understand the general experience of the user and decide how to focus your development work.
5. Order Backlog Items
Don’t just guess what improvements to add to your backlog. Set their priorities based on how valuable and important they could be. Which traits will change your key performance indicators the most? What improvements will make things better for users the most? To help you make smart choices, use a strategy for setting priorities like the Value vs. Effort matrix.
6. Test Your Assumptions
Do some small-scale experiments to make sure your assumptions are correct before you spend a lot of time and money making a new feature. To find out if your ideas are good, make prototypes, run A/B tests, and ask users for comments. This will help you avoid making things that no one wants.
7. Make Changes From Feedback
The method of making a product is called “iterative.” Don’t be afraid to change your plans if users and other important people tell you to. Keep an eye on your key performance indicators all the time and make changes to your plan as needed.
8. Write User Stories
Write user stories that make it clear what each feature will do for the user and how it will help them. This is how you should write it: “As [user persona], I want to [goal] so that [benefit].” This will help your developers understand “why” each feature is important and make sure they’re doing the right thing.
9. Continue to Update Your Backlog
Make sure that your product list is always up-to-date by grooming it regularly. Get rid of items that are out of date or don’t belong, and add new ones based on your ongoing study and testing.
Lastly, we’ll cover how you can make your product demos stand out with some final tips below.
How to Make Your Product Demos Stand Out
By adding product and customer discovery to your Scrum process, you’ll be ready to give stakeholders demos of your products that hit home. Here are some more ways to make your demos stand out:
- Start with the “Why”: Before you show off features, tell the people who matter what the product’s goals are and the problems you’re trying to solve for users.
- Add Value: Not only should you show benefits, but you should also talk about how they help users reach their goals and how they add value to the business.
- Focus on the Outcomes: Don’t just talk about the work itself; stress the results of your work as well. Show how your key success indicators have changed because of your new features.
- Get Feedback: Use the demo of your product as a chance to get feedback from people who matter. Find out what they think about the new features and how they could be made better.
- Keep it Short: Show respect for the time of your clients by keeping your demo short and to the point. Keep the focus on the most important features and stay away from the technical ones.
- Practice, Practice, Practice: Go over your presentation several times to make sure it goes smoothly and that you feel good giving the information.
The Scrum Product Owner’s Journey From Output to Outcome
Your main job as a Scrum Product Owner is to make the product as valuable as possible. You can ensure that your product demos are more than just lists of features by focusing on results over output and incorporating continuous product and customer discovery into your development process. This method will not only make your stakeholders happy, but it will also make your product more successful and useful.
Take the next step in improving your outcomes by joining our Two-Day Scrum Product Owner Training Course. You’ll learn more about outcome-driven development and see your product demos go from boring tasks to useful chances to work together, get feedback, and improve.
