What is a Measurable Outcome (MO)?

First published: 11th December 2014

A Measurable Outcome, or MO, is the desired future state. As the name suggests, it should be something that can be measured to tell you whether you have made progress towards it or not.

It could be a simple outcome, for example, increasing conversion rates, minimizing support calls, or improving time to market.

Outcomes exist at multiple levels. They might be high-level strategic goals, for example, to increase customer acquisition, increase monetization, and improve customer engagement.

They might be product-level outcomes. For an e-commerce website, it is to increase conversion rates.
For services, it might be necessary to improve the website availability.

There might be capability outcomes, for example, Decreasing time to market, deploying products faster, and reducing costs in operating systems.

The key things you need to know are how to understand that you have met your outcome and have made a difference.

1. Name
State the outcome clearly by naming it and making it action-oriented (Verb + noun phrase). Everyday actions might be to Improve, Increase or Minimize. Usually, we will make these a positive change, e.g., instead of decreasing churn, we will improve engagement. However, you can use verbs such as decrease or reduce.

2. Value
Tie the outcome to the value it will deliver. Often, this will be monetary as money is a common currency we can use to tie our value to it, but only sometimes. Chris Matts ties the revenue states to making, saving, or protecting revenue. Other examples of non-monetary values might be acquiring knowledge or sharing ideas. For example, if the outcome was to increase conversion rates for a website, then the value might be how much each 1% conversion is worth to the company annually as a monetary value.

3. Scale
What is the unit of measure: For example, %, time (days, hours, milliseconds), or the number (how many unique users, click-thru rates etc)

4. Baseline
The starting point for improvement and where you have taken the initial measurement. This is a snapshot to compare future results against. For example, the Baseline of current conversions is 14% (taken from the web analytics system on March 25).

5. Method
The what, who, and how the measurements will be observed or captured. For example, the usability research lead runs the Usability test at a facility monthly.

5. Current state
The current progress or new baseline. This is the leading indicator, a progressive measure that provides feedback on the current progress.

To target or not to target

Teams will often set themselves a target or target range. This is not mandatory. The issue will be to feel a sense of failure for failing to achieve the total target number. However, each incremental improvement might still have value. If there is a reason for the target, for example, if there is a direct link between the length of time it takes to load a page for an e-commerce website and the number of successful conversions, then there might need to be a specific target of a minimum of 4 seconds. In this case, adding the targets is a very good idea.