What did you work on last week? What feature did you add, or what problem did you solve at work? Take a moment to remember…

Now can you answer: Why?

“Because the task was assigned to me” doesn’t count. Why was that task assigned to you, or even created, in the first place?

What business value is that task expected to bring? What outcome does it aim to achieve?

“It improves the user experience” or “It improves performance” or “A customer requested it” don’t count either.

How do you know that it improves user experience or performance? And even if it does, who cares? And who cares if a customer requested it. Customers request are often ridiculous.

Of course improving user experience and peformance, and sometimes implementing feature requests can be good things. But they must be in service of a desired business outcome. “Better user experience”, “better performance” and “new features” are not business outcomes. They are tactics. Choosing which tacticts to employ is the hard part.

To do that, first identify the business outcome you’re hoping to achieve. Joshua Seiden, author of [Outcomes Over Output]https://amzn.to/2VezwBo() defines an outcome as “a change in human behavior that drives business results.”

If “more subscriptions” or “reduce costs” or “fewer customer service calls” are your target business results, then our previously mentioned activites might be appropriate:

• If improving user experience leads to more users signing up, then it’s worth while. If it just leads to a warmer, fuzzier feeling in the customers (or more likely, the designers), it’s not worth it.
• If improving performance means you need fewer EC2 instances, then it’s worth while. If it just means your login page does one fewer database queries, and now loads 0.0003s faster, it’s not worth it.
• If implementing a feature request means that fewer customers will call customer service, it’s worth it. If it means some customer was “just wondering”, it’s not worth it.

Make sure you understand the business outcome your work is aiming to achieve. And if you can’t determine this, I encourage you to push back. Do your best work, by working on what matters most!