Outcome Driven Development

Focus on outcomes, not outputs

What is Outcome Driven Development?

Teams who practice outcome driven development prioritize the customer-value of the software they ship over the velocity at which they ship it.

Software teams have long been instilled to measure work by output, but outcome driven development underscores the rising importance of customer satisfaction in the world of software development. Customers demand products and new features that function properly and add value more than they value a steady stream of new products/features.

An online survey of 500 software and IT professionals found that:


ranked CSAT as a top tier success metric

But 60% say it's difficult to measure for the feature they develop.

Learn more about the benefits and challenges

Benefits of Outcome Driven Development

Customer Satisfaction

Because outcome driven development is informed directly by customer input prior to development, new features and functionality that are rolled out are more likely to deliver tangible value to customers.

More efficient development cycles

With customer feedback as an input in the product development lifecycle - rather than an output - the development process is optimized to reduce the number of iterations required to achieve a product market fit. 

Align with teams outside of software

When software teams build features based off customer value, surrounding teams benefit too. Customer inputs inform marketing messaging and positioning, sales will be better equipped to beat the competition, and customer service complaints will decrease.

Challenges of Outcome Driven Development

Redefining team goals

Software teams measured on volume have to redefine what "success" means and shift to a customer-centric approach to development. This means tapping into their user base before building anything to determine which outcome they want to achieve next.

Retaining visibility of the goal

Shifting from volume to value outcomes requires a totally different set of metrics to track. Ensuring the right analytics and dashboards are in place is another consideration for organizations moving to outcome driven development.

Investing in the continuous delivery loop

Outcome driven development means embracing an agile approach to software development, where deployments happen daily, rollout of new features to customers happens gradually, and customer input is an integral part of the overall decision-making process.

Focus on value, not outputs,
with Jira Software

Outcome driven development is all about the value of outcomes over outputs and Jira Software allows teams to take control over exactly what is put in customers' hands.

Feature Flagging

Feature flagging allows teams to roll out new features and functionality gradually to customers, allowing them to move faster and with better control over the value delivered to customers.

Jira Software and Bitbucket

Integrate Jira Software and Bitbucket together and gain insight into real-time build and deployment information in the context of all your other issue data. 

Measure what matters

Jira integrates with an assortment of apps and extensions that enable teams to measure the customer impact of the new features they roll out.

Ready to shift from outputs to outcomes?

Raising the flag: The rise of Feature Flagging

We partnered with to dive deep into the world of feature flagging.

5 tips for getting started with Feature Flags

This blog shares everything you need to utilize feature flags in your outcome-driven organization.

Create continuous visibility with Bitbucket Pipelines

Check out how Bitbucket Pipelines and Jira Software gives you continuous visibility from backlog to release.