Money as a result, not a plan

Stakeholders who set out to make money often miss. The ones who set out to build something good sometimes make money, which sounds backwards until you look at what each of them is steering by.

I've watched products start optimising for money results and decline, while the ones that iterated on being better got the real growth.

Money isn't something you do. It's what happens when something else works. So a team aiming at revenue has to step over the part that produces it, and ends up pulling whichever lever moves the number this quarter: the price, the upsell, the thing that converts today. None of those make the product better, and the product was where the money came from.

Resulting

There's a name for the general version of this, and it comes from poker. Resulting: judging a decision by how it turned out instead of by whether it was a good decision when you made it.

In 1988 two researchers gave people a surgeon's decision to judge, odds written down in front of them. Half were told the patient lived, half were told the patient died, and nothing else about the case was different. The ones told the patient died rated the surgeon's judgement worse. All of them had said beforehand that the outcome shouldn't change how they judged it.

Poker teaches it faster. You can play a hand perfectly and lose it, and you can play one badly and win.

If you are only measuring outcomes, you are measuring the wrong thing.

That version points backwards, at a decision already made. The money version points forwards. One grades the past by its result, the other aims at a result instead of at its cause. Both make the same mistake about what a result is: it gets produced, it doesn't get chosen.

In product

The backwards kind shows up in how launches get reviewed. One that grew is written up as a good decision and the whole process gets repeated, luck included: the timing, a competitor stumbling, a channel that happened to be cheap that month. One that didn't grow gets the opposite treatment, and sound reasoning is thrown out along with the result.

The military has a habit worth stealing here. After a mission comes the after action report: what was supposed to happen, what actually happened, what to do differently. David Goggins uses it on himself after anything that matters, wins included. What makes it work is that it's written down, and that it happens whether the thing went well or badly.

The other half of it belongs before you start. Write down what you expect, and what would tell you that you were wrong. Then the review has something to check the outcome against besides the outcome.