How to set an outcome
An outcome is a business result with a price tag. If you cannot price it, it is not an outcome, it is a wish.
- steps
- 8
- named failure modes
- 5
- definition-of-done criteria
- 6
How to set an outcome, in one paragraph
An outcome is the top of the work breakdown: a business result carrying a target in currency, a baseline you can measure today, arithmetic anyone can re-run, and one named person accountable for the number. Good looks like a single sentence a finance director and an engineer would both recognise as true, priced in one visible calculation, with the validation query written and tested before anything is committed. Outcomes can span quarters. Every epic, story and chapter underneath exists only because it traces back to one.
What these are. The delivery operating model our engagements install alongside client teams: the method underneath the agentic work rather than the agentic work itself, published in full and free to use. It is written for the person running a quarter, not for a buyer, so if you are evaluating us, read the five priced engagements or the case studies instead.
Whenever the business wants something new started, before anyone writes an epic or a ticket. Also when you inherit a roadmap nobody can trace to a number, because reconstructing the outcome behind work already in flight is the fastest way to find out what should be cancelled.
- Time to run it once
- About six hours, across a few sittings
- What you need
- The reporting system the baseline comes from
- The tracker the outcome and its epics live in
Step by step
Each step is deep-linkable, so you can send a colleague the one that is in dispute.
- 1
Write the result, not the feature
Start from what changes for the business, not what gets built.
"Rebuild the checkout" is a feature. "More of the customers who reach checkout complete their order" is a result. Write one sentence naming who benefits, what changes for them, and which business metric moves in which direction. Then apply two tests. Strike out every technology, vendor and screen name: if the sentence stops making sense, you have written a solution. Ask whether it would still be true if you delivered it a completely different way. If not, you have priced a plan rather than a result, and the plan will change.
- 2
Pull the baseline before you name a target
Get the current number yourself, with whoever owns the report sitting there.
Record four things: the figure, the exact date range, the filters applied (internal traffic, bots, refunds, test orders), and the query or report anyone can re-run. Then re-run it a week later. If it returns a different number, you do not have a baseline, you have a screenshot. Where no baseline exists, your first epic is instrumenting it and the outcome stays in Exploring until the figure arrives. A commitment built on a baseline nobody can reproduce fails validation loudly, in front of the people whose trust you were trying to earn.
- 3
Price it in one line of checkable arithmetic
Convert the movement into money in one visible line: baseline volume, expected change, value per unit, margin, period.
Write the calculation into the outcome rather than presenting a figure that arrived from nowhere. Take margin and lifetime value from finance's numbers, not your own, and name whose they are. State the period explicitly, because a million annualised and a million in-quarter are different commitments. Then flex the two assumptions you are least sure of by a third each. If the target no longer justifies the quarter, it is a coin toss and the owner needs to know that before signing.
- 4
Name one owner who will carry the number
One name, on the business side, in whose forecast the number lands.
Not a committee, not a function, not the delivery team. The owner supplies the assumptions, agrees the baseline, and is the person who says the value did not land if it did not. Test it with one question: will you carry this number in your own plan for the year? A yes with caveats means write the caveats down and price them. A no means the business does not believe the number, which is worth finding out a quarter before you spend one. Delivery owns whether the epics ship; the owner owns whether they were the right epics.
- 5
Write and run the validation query before committing
State which report, which segment, which comparison window, and what size of movement counts as signal rather than noise.
Then run it today against the pre-change period. If it will not execute now, it will not execute at the monthly outcome validation either, and validation runs every month on every live outcome. Say how long the signal takes to accumulate: an epic returning forty thousand a month cannot be judged in three weeks. Finally, write down in advance the condition that would make you call this not realised. Agreeing the failure condition while everyone is optimistic is far easier than agreeing it afterwards.
- 6
Set the horizon, then plan headroom
Name the quarters the outcome spans, and the single quarter each epic sits in, because epics cannot cross a roadmap boundary.
Then plan more epic value than the target. Derive the ratio from your own history: value realised divided by value planned across the last four closed quarters. At 70% realisation, a £1m target needs roughly £1.43m of planned epic value behind it. Re-derive that ratio every quarter, because it moves as the team and the domain change. Headroom is not sandbagging. It is the difference between a target that survives one epic underperforming and one that collapses when it does. In a regulated firm there is one addition. Where an outcome touches pricing, reserving or a customer outcome, the validation query has to be reproducible by someone who was not in the room, and the actuarial or compliance owner is named on the outcome alongside the business owner. Not as a reviewer at the end, as a named owner from the point the horizon is set.
- 7
Break it into epics and check the sum
Each epic links to this outcome and no other, carries its planned share, and belongs to one quarter.
Add the shares up: a £1m outcome with four £200k epics is a £200k hole, and it belongs in planning rather than week eleven. Then check for double counting, which the sum will not catch. Two epics both claiming the same conversion lift on the same traffic total £400k on paper and deliver £200k. Where epics move the same units, fix the landing order and price each on what the previous leaves behind. Close any gap by adding an epic, raising a share with a reason, or lowering the target today.
- 8
Commit at the gate, close on a reason
Committed is not a label applied because the outcome appeared in a board pack.
It means five things exist: a reproducible baseline, visible arithmetic, a named owner, a validation query that runs, and an epic breakdown that sums with headroom. Until all five exist it sits in Exploring. Review live outcomes monthly, and close each on a stated reason: all linked epics done, value realised, or accepted as not realised. Use the third whenever it is the true one. An operating model that has never closed an outcome as not realised is not being measured honestly, and everyone downstream of it works that out eventually.
Worked example: pricing a checkout outcome at an invented retailer
- Result
- more of the customers who reach checkout complete their order.
- Baseline
- 2.4% of sessions convert, measured over the twelve weeks to 30 June from the analytics property the growth analyst owns, excluding internal IP ranges and known bot traffic. 9.1m sessions a year, £52 average order value, 41% gross margin supplied by finance. It reconciles: 9.1m at 2.4% at £52 is £11.4m, which matches the online revenue line, so the baseline is not measuring a different population from the P&L.
- Target movement
- 2.4% to 3.1%, a 0.7 percentage point lift.
- Arithmetic
- 9.1m multiplied by 0.007 is 63,700 additional orders a year. At £52 that is £3.31m of revenue, and at 41% margin it is £1.36m of gross profit. The outcome is priced at £1.36m annualised. The in-quarter share is stated separately: the change goes live in week six of a thirteen-week quarter, so seven weeks of benefit, £1.36m divided by 52 multiplied by 7 is £183k.
- Sensitivity
- if margin is really 35% and the lift is 0.5 points rather than 0.7, the number falls to £830k. Still worth the quarter, so the target stands, and both figures go in front of the owner.
- Owner
- the ecommerce director, named, who confirms she will carry the £1.36m in next year's plan.
- Validation
- conversion rate by device, weekly, against the twelve-week pre-change period, with orders reconciled to the finance ledger rather than to analytics. Anything under a 0.3 point move is noise. Six weeks of post-live data before anyone calls it.
- Not realised if
- there is no sustained movement above 0.3 points eight weeks after the last epic ships.
- Epics, all in Q3
- guest checkout £620k, payment failure retry £510k, address autocomplete £340k. All three move the same conversion number, so they are priced in landing order and each carries only what it adds on top of the one before. The shares total £1.47m against a £1.36m target. The last four quarters realised 70% of planned value, so the headroom rule wants £1.94m behind this target. That is £470k short, and it is visible in planning: either a fourth epic goes in, or the owner is told today that the honest target is £1.03m.
Northgate Supply is a made-up online retailer with roughly £11m of annual online revenue. Every number below is invented, and the point is the shape of the arithmetic rather than the figures. The business says the checkout is bad. Here is that turned into an outcome.
Worked example: pricing a claims document outcome at an invented insurer
- Result
- fewer claims documents need a human to read, key and file them before the claim can move.
- Baseline
- 260,000 claims documents handled in the twelve months to 30 June, counted from the claims workflow system, excluding duplicates and internal re-scans. Average handling time of 11.0 minutes per document, taken from the same system's start and finish timestamps and reconciled against a two-week sample the claims operations manager sat through herself. The loaded hourly cost is £34, supplied by finance and covering salary, on-costs and a share of supervision. It reconciles: 260,000 at 11 minutes is 47,700 hours a year, which at £34 is £1.62m, and that sits inside the claims operating cost line rather than beside it.
- Target movement
- 55% of documents handled end to end with no human keying, with the remaining 45% unchanged.
- Arithmetic
- 260,000 multiplied by 0.55 is 143,000 documents. At 11 minutes each that is 26,200 hours a year, and at £34 an hour it is £891k of handling effort released. That figure is the honest measure of the work removed, and it is not the price of the outcome.
- Recovered capacity, not money
- 26,200 hours is 15.4 full-time equivalents at 1,700 productive hours each. Nothing has left the business until a cost line actually falls, so the outcome splits the number in two. The claims operation currently buys 6 FTE of agency cover to hold the backlog at £38 an hour loaded, which is 6 multiplied by 1,700 multiplied by £38, or £388k a year, and that cover is not renewed once the straight-through rate holds. That £388k is money. The remaining 9.4 FTE are permanent handlers who stay on the payroll, so it is recovered capacity, it is recorded as 9.4 FTE with the work it is being redeployed onto named, and it is booked in the outcome at zero. The outcome is priced at £388k annualised. The in-quarter share is stated separately: live in week five of a thirteen-week quarter, so eight weeks of benefit, £388k divided by 52 multiplied by 8 is £60k.
- Sensitivity
- if straight-through lands at 40% rather than 55%, and only 4 FTE of agency cover can be released, the money falls to 4 multiplied by 1,700 multiplied by £38, or £258k. Still worth the quarter, so the target stands, and both figures go in front of the owner.
- Owner
- the claims director, named, who confirms she will carry the £388k as a reduction in the agency cover line in next year's plan, and who states plainly that she will not carry the 9.4 FTE as a saving.
- Validation
- the agency cover spend on the purchase ledger, monthly, against the same twelve-month pre-change period, alongside straight-through rate by document type from the claims workflow system. The ledger is the primary source, because that is where money leaving the business shows up; the workflow dashboard is the explanation, not the evidence. Anything under a 5 percentage point move in straight-through rate is noise. Three months of post-live data before anyone calls it.
- Not realised if
- the agency cover line has not fallen by at least £250k annualised six months after the last epic ships, whatever the straight-through rate says.
- Epics, all in Q4
- document classification and routing £180k, structured extraction with confidence-routed human review £150k, straight-through handling for the two simplest document types £120k. All three move the same document population, so they are priced in landing order and each carries only what it adds on top of the one before. The shares total £450k against a £388k target. The last four quarters realised 70% of planned value, so the headroom rule wants £554k behind this target. That is £104k short, and it is visible in planning: either a fourth epic goes in, or the owner is told today that the honest target is £315k.
Marlow Mutual is a made-up UK general insurer. Every number below is invented, and the point is the shape of the arithmetic rather than the figures. A checkout conversion rate does not transfer to an insurer, so this is the same method run on an operational cost base rather than a revenue line, and it works the harder half out loud: how much of a saving is actually money.
Where this goes wrong
- 01
Pricing the solution rather than the result.
"A new mobile app, worth £2m" welds the value to one way of getting it, so when a cheaper route appears in week four the number cannot survive the change and the whole outcome has to be reopened. Price the result and let epics compete to deliver it.
- 02
Reverse-engineering the number from the budget, or lifting it from a vendor deck or an industry benchmark.
A figure built to justify a spend already decided, or borrowed from someone else's business, cannot be reconciled to your reporting, so the first monthly validation becomes an argument about the source instead of the result. If it did not come from your own data and your own finance team, it will not survive contact with validation.
- 03
Committing before a baseline exists.
Teams commit on the strength of the story and plan to sort measurement out later. Later arrives without the historical data you needed, and the outcome closes as unvalidated, which is worse than closing as not realised because you learn nothing you can calibrate against.
- 04
Counting a cost saving twice.
A saving is only currency if the cost leaves the business. Headcount redeployed onto other work is recovered capacity, not money, and booking it as money in the outcome and again in the budget is the fastest way to lose finance's trust in the whole roadmap. Say plainly which one it is.
- 05
One outcome broad enough to absorb the entire quarter.
If every team can claim to contribute, no epic's planned share means anything and the arithmetic stops working as a check. Several concurrent outcomes with tight targets and real owners beat one that everything hangs off.
Done means
- The outcome reads as a business result and still makes sense after striking every technology, vendor and screen name out of the sentence.
- The baseline has a figure, a date range, its filters and a re-runnable query, and someone other than you has re-run it and got the same number.
- The price is one visible line of arithmetic using finance's margin figures, the period is stated as in-quarter or annualised, and the two weakest assumptions have been flexed to see what breaks.
- One named person on the business side has said they will carry the number in their own plan, and their caveats are written down.
- The validation query has been run today against the pre-change period, and the condition for calling the outcome not realised is recorded.
- The linked epics sum to the target plus headroom derived from your own realisation ratio, no two epics count the same units twice, and any remaining gap is named and owned rather than left open.
Outcome setting is identical in both delivery modes: the baseline, the price, the owner and the validation plan do not change. What changes is what sits underneath. AI-augmented teams break the outcome into epics and then stories. AI-native teams stop at the epic, so the outcome ticket has to carry the currency share, the key user journeys and the test requirements itself, because there is no story layer below it to hold that detail. Use a model to pressure-test the arithmetic, generate the sensitivity cases and draft the first epic breakdown for a human to cut. Do not let it produce the baseline: that figure comes out of your own reporting, run by a named person who can run it again next month.
The two delivery modes, side by side →Questions
How do you price work with no revenue line, like compliance, security or platform?
Price the loss you are avoiding, not the feeling of safety. Regulatory work carries an exposure, a remediation cost and a probability of landing inside the horizon: £4m of exposure at a 30% chance is £1.2m, and legal or finance owns both of those inputs, not you. Platform work is priced through what it unblocks. If a migration is the precondition for £900k of epics that cannot start without it, that is the number, and it validates when those epics validate. What does not work is pricing effort, or pricing away a problem you were never going to have.
How precise does the price need to be?
Precise enough that two competent people re-running the arithmetic land within about 20% of each other, and no more precise than that. The number earns its place by forcing assumptions into the open and letting you compare one outcome against another, not by predicting the P&L to the pound. If flexing a single assumption moves the answer by an order of magnitude, that assumption is the real work: go and reduce the uncertainty before committing, rather than averaging it away and hoping.
Can one epic contribute to two outcomes?
No. An epic links to exactly one outcome. The moment its value is split across two, neither outcome's arithmetic can be checked and neither owner can be held to a number. If an epic serves two outcomes, decide which one it primarily belongs to, price its full share there, and note the second-order benefit on the other without booking currency against it. If that decision feels impossible, the two outcomes are probably one outcome that has been split for organisational reasons.
What happens when the value does not land?
Close the outcome as accepted as not realised, with the validation figures attached and a note on which assumption broke: the baseline was wrong, the movement was smaller than expected, or the value per unit did not hold. That closure is worth more than a quiet success, because it recalibrates the realisation ratio you use to size headroom on the next outcome. The failure mode to avoid is closing it as unvalidated. That teaches nothing and slowly inflates your calibration until the forecasts stop meaning anything.
More on setting up the work
These guides are written to be read in order.
02How to put together a quarterly roadmap
A roadmap is one quarter, twelve to thirteen weeks. Outcomes can span quarters; epics cannot.
How to write a value-focused epic
An epic is your unit of value contribution to an outcome. If it does not carry a number, it is a feature wishlist.
How to break an epic into stories
A story is the smallest piece of user-visible value the team can ship. If it does not change the user's experience, it is a chapter, not a story.
How to do discovery research
Discovery is how a hypothesis stops being a hunch. Keep the evidence linked to the work, not buried in an archive.
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