This week we had a wonderful dinner and conversation with designers from Anthropic, Replit, Webflow, Airtable, Perplexity, Chroma, Airbnb, GitHub, and Notion about using AI for design and designing for AI.

The vibe might not be what you expected—optimistic, human, and curious. Many of us are working on sentient tooling that elevates the human experience. The arrival of AI in the design space is like when the camera obscura was introduced to artists.

We covert topics such as re-skilling ourselves, the importance of taste/intention being a differentiator, and where we’re spending our time when the effort and cost to make software is nearly zero.

Instead of constantly talking about AI, perhaps explore the material and understand the implications.

It was nice to break to enjoy Omakase with incredible humans.

Today marks three years since we said goodbye to my cat Wilson, who lived with us for all 19 years of his life. I know people who are pet lovers say it’ll get better over time and encourage adopting another pet. I don’t know if I ever can. We miss you so much, Wilson.

Originally posted on Proof of Concept

Outcome: A final product or end results.

“Manage towards outcomes,” a VP of Engineering I worked with always says. It’s something the EPD group I worked with would keep as a mantra. This framing, while tiny in detail, is crucial to remember in the midst of the chaos of work. As a manager, you want to avoid the resource management trap—thinking about how time is used vs. what needs to get done. This applies to both overseeing your team and how you as a manager prioritized your own time.

Many people’s first role as a manager starts with direct line management—overseeing a specific team with no layers. It’s natural for line managers to think about resource management. That was the intention of the role of managers overseeing people in an assembly line—less relevant in building a tech company. Managing towards outcomes is focusing on the intended results and affecting change towards that. This sounds obvious, but is easier said than done. Instead of thinking about the time needed to achieve a result, focus on what needs to get done and the inputs required to achieve it.

As important as being people-centric as a leader is, you are a leader of the outcome. A Head of Product is responsible for the outcomes of the product, not only the people on their team doing the work. There are other factors such as operations on how the work is delivered, the quality of the work, and balancing financial resources in order to achieve it.

The input/output exercise

When forced with complex challenges, I try to distill it to the simplest form of it. The input/output exercise can help you map what you need and are doing to the desired outcome. This exercise has three components:

1. Left: Inputs you need from the company to achieve your goals
2. Middle: Your team’s purpose in how they contribute to the desired outcomes the company (and how your team is responsible for delivering it)
3. Right: Outputs and artifacts your team will deliver to inform the outcomes

Outcomes

Though it’s out of order from left-to-right, start in the center with the desired outcome. Reflect on your team’s purpose and how they contribute to the company vision. How you determine the desired outcome varies on the maturity of your company. If you’re at an earlier stage company, you may not have any benchmarks to move any metrics. It’s better to have a task-oriented desired outcome that’s clear than realize a metric you set can’t be measured. Keep in mind the following are important factors but not outcomes: effort, process, motion, status, and intent.

Inputs

Inputs are what your team needs in order to achieve the desired outcome. This may be resources needed, information, or something unblocked in order for your team to do their work. A few examples of inputs are: data, headcount, dependencies with other teams, etc.

Outputs

What is delivered to inform the outcome. The outputs are artifacts—proof of work what your team made happen independently of the inputs. The outputs either directly contribute to the outcome such as a product shipped or go-to-market campaign launched. However, they can also be artifacts that inform a desired outcome. For example, a research team’s value is not building and shipping the product but deliver an artifact of insights that inform what is built.

The outcome of outputs vary on timeline. Because designs are delivered recently for a new feature doesn’t mean ARR will skyrocket. However, it may be the blueprint of a missing customer need that results in it down the road.

Here’s what a recap of your input/output exercise might look like::

• Our product quality has been eroding. A root cause of it is because of a fragmented design system. We’d like to hire two designers to initialize a team that can support the product teams on consistency and scale of design patterns
• Growth has sputtered at the company. We need to explore product investments that’ll increase ARR or expand our Total Addressable Market (TAM). We need input on Strategic Finance to help us understand if there is a demand people will pay for in the market
• In a recent company survey, 60% of team members indicated they did not see career growth at the company. We’d like increase our L&D budget to invest in areas where team members want to grow

How you spend your time depends on the desired outcome

I describe management in three core aspects: operator, strategist, and coach. It’s not a perfect distribution across everything you do. Where you prioritize your involvement varies on each direct report, priority, and how things are progressing. It’s not set it and forget it. It’s being constantly heads up over heads down. One of my favorite frameworks is Hersey-Blanchard’s Situation Leadership. It’s a great exercise to help you think about how you prioritize your involvement across the team.

Depending on the desired outcome and how it’s staffed, you may be hands on or hands off. There are areas of responsibility where there might be more maturity that you can be hands off. While you’ve delegated that area, there might be a new team you’re building that requires you to initialize the work as you hire the team. This is my recommendation on how you balance your time—allocation based on every work stream vs. a catch-all across the entire organization.

Outcomes evolve—iterate

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” —Mike Tyson

Managing towards outcomes will need to be balanced with reality. Don’t be surprised that once you set desired outcomes with lovely inputs/outputs that things change. This happens frequently in organizations with rapid change. The speed in moving to a different direction is crucial to stay alive—the difference between navigating a speedboat vs. turning an aircraft carrier around.

A former manager once told me you have to choose which fires requires your attention most because there will be multiple fires. Re-balance your focal area weekly, if not daily.

Managing towards outcomes is difficult to prioritize and think about. It’s why many companies don’t do it. As you fight the fires, stay focused on the desired outcomes—something you should be able to fit on an index card and repeatedly articulate.

Avoid the resource management trap and manage towards outcomes.