Level Up Your Outcome Focused Portfolio

Outcome focused Portfolios Management helps product teams create a blueprint for success and is an essential component of product development and decision making. By focusing on the “why” or desired outcomes, product teams work backwards to develop the best plan to achieve desired outcomes.

In this article, we will cover how to take your outcome focused practice to the next step.

Here’s how:

1. Set measurable portfolio and product goals
2. Allocation and prioritization
3. Track outcome progress
4. Outcome Based allocation/ reallocation

Set measurable portfolio and product goals  

Measurable product goals are important for ensuring that a product team is working towards specific, quantifiable targets. These goals should be set at different levels, such as annual goals for the entire organization and quarterly goals for individual teams.

Here’s how you can set measurable product goals in Dragonboat:

1. Assign time period, owner, and product team to goals- Set a specific timeframe for each goal to help ensure progress is being made, and assign a specific person or team that is responsible for achieving goals to drive accountability. You can easily add these accountability drivers from the OKR edit screen. Here’s How.
2. Create multiple levels of goals- For example, you can set annual goals that are aligned with a company’s overall business strategy and involve key stakeholders in their development. These goals can then be broken down into quarterly goals by specific product teams.

You can create multiple levels of goal hierarchy using goal mode. Goal mode can be accessed from Portfolio List and 3D by clicking on the drop-down to change views.

3. Assign metrics to goals- Add and assign specific metrics to measure progress towards each goal. This provides a way to track progress of your goals. Here’s how to add success metrics to your goals.  

Here’s an example of what this may look like:

A company goal for a new e-commerce platform might be to Achieve $1M new ARR by the end of 2023. This goal could be broken down into level 2 Goals such as increasing the number of monthly active users by 25% and some initiatives might be to improve the user interface and increase marketing efforts. The metrics for measuring progress could include the number of new users, conversion, and retention rates.

Allocation and prioritization

Allocation and prioritization refers to the process of dividing resources among various tasks or goals in order to achieve the best possible outcomes.

 To level up your OFP,  this involves:

1. Setting target allocations for each goal, based on their importance and potential impact, and then regularly reviewing and adjusting these allocations as needed. Here’s how to set target allocations in Dragonboat.
2. Using Data-driven prioritization to make informed product decisions, Dragonboat supports prioritization frameworks such as RICE or MoAR to evaluate and compare potential value vs effort on different goals and initiatives. 
3. Analyzing insights using the portfolio delivery dashboard (Enterprise+ Plan feature) to see how an individual product team’s work is contributing to the overall goals. This can provide valuable insights and help inform re-allocation decisions, in order to ensure that resources are being used in the most effective and efficient way possible. More information on the portfolio delivery dashboard.

Track outcome progress

In order to level up your outcome focused practice, product teams must consistently measure their progress against desired outcomes. Dragonboat helps you easily track outcome progress in multiple ways:

1. Advanced Metric Table-  The advanced metric report enables you to set track your progress, and adjust your portfolio allocation and roadmaps to best achieve them. By entering a metric for an OKR, you can track the current and target values. Here’s how to use the advanced metrics table to track outcome progress.
2. Snapshot Page- The snapshot page provides visibility into both outcome progress and roadmap progress side-by-side to inform decisions and engage stakeholders. Learn more about the snapshot page.

Outcome Based Allocation and Reallocation

Outcome-based reallocation decisions can be made using the allocation report which compares the planned allocation of resources with the target allocation and the reported allocation from engineering tools. 

This allows you to see how well the actual/reported allocation of resources aligns with the planned and target allocations to identify any discrepancies or variances. Using this information, product teams can make informed decisions about reallocating resources in a way that best achieves outcomes.

Here’s how to use the allocation report to compare plan vs target allocation.

Note: The dashboard allocation feature is only available to Enterprise + Plans Customers

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