Design for outcomes: How Outshift created a design-led framework for testing and delivering innovation

As Outshift's Head of Product Design, I'm fortunate to be a part of a significant shift in our product development approach, which is directly aligned with our core mission to drive innovation through curiosity.

Our team, a blend of talented product managers, designers and engineering leaders, is committed to transforming ideas into action—developing real software and platforms that address near-term and future challenges.

To do this, we challenged ourselves to move beyond conventional product development methods and adopt a more agile, evidence-based approach that aligns with our vision of incubating and accelerating future-forward solutions.

Traditionally, product development teams follow a linear decision-making approach to determine product features. They often start with a strong hypothesis, build it out, and then release it into the market, hoping to better understand the customers' needs post-launch. 

This approach, which essentially waits until the product hits the market to test and learn, carries significant risks and uncertainties. It often incurs more development time and cost and leads to a longer time for value realization. As a result, this puts us in a position where we must convince customers of the product's worth, hoping they see the same value we do.

At Outshift, our mission requires a proactive approach. We cannot afford to build and then wait to learn. 

Therefore, we're reshaping our product development model to prioritize learning. By rigorously testing and validating our understanding of the market and user needs, we ensure that insights drive our building process from the start.

In response to this change, design-led workshops are now a fundamental part of our development process, ensuring that every product or feature we work on is a direct result of learning from and aligning with our users' needs. 

The evolving role of design in product development at Outshift

Outshift's leadership realized very quickly that the move from a "build first, ask questions later" process to a systematic, evidence-guided approach would require a strong, next-practice, product design team.

In the past, design was often relegated to the final stages of product development, primarily focusing on aesthetics or "usability" for transactional frontend tasks after the product offering had been "all figured out.”

At Outshift, we have redefined the design role to be a cornerstone of our product development from the outset, getting involved early and often.

By collaborating closely with product managers, developers, and other stakeholders, Outshift product designers help to articulate and realize a shared vision. This collaboration reduces misunderstandings, makes development more efficient, and focuses everyone on delivering key value outcomes.

This evolution of design's role has not only elevated the importance of designers but also expanded their responsibilities. Their role extends beyond providing "screen designs" near the end of development. Now, they are instrumental in guiding the team, translating complex and often ambiguous concepts into clear, actionable items.

In response, our product designer goals, and performance assessments have evolved beyond design excellence in usability and delivery, to broader, more ambitious areas that actively serve the mission of Outshift.

The initial impact of the new product design role was first evident during the re-launch of Panoptica, our cloud security offering, earlier this year. By engaging with our acquisition of Lightspin early in the design process, we fostered a unified CNAPP platform rather than separate solutions bolted together. Our approach has since matured into a commitment to deliver further customer value, specifically in areas such as generative AI (GAI), attack path analysis, and policy management.

I firmly believe that integrating design early in our development cycle is a game-changer. This approach is already proving to be a vital part of Outshift's vision, enabling us to find alignment faster to test and learn.

– Papi Menon, Vice President, Head of Product Management, Outshift

From opinion to evidence-based design

At Outshift, bringing in design early and often accelerated our shift from opinion-based decision-making to an evidence-based framework.

As Itamar Gilad highlights in his book, Evidence-Guided: Creating High-Impact Products in the Face of Uncertainty, while product people often focus more on value delivery and business people on value capture, the collective mission should be to achieve both.

The Value Exchange Loop

• North Star Metric (NSM): measures overall value delivered.
• Top Business Metric (TBM): measures overall value captured.

In response, we collaborated closely with our design operations and customer feedback teams to create a thorough design process.

This method involves detailed validation of each hypothesis, from initial discovery to prototyping and market testing. Our goal is to ensure that our products fulfill both our North Star Metric—which gauges customer value—and the key business performance metric.

Through this approach, we're not only improving our product's chances of success but also our organizational mindset.

Building on another concept from Gilad’s book, the Confidence Meter tool categorizes types of evidence by the confidence they provide, ranging from near-zero (deep blue) to high (deep red). 

Recognizing the need to guide product teams and the organization through a similar confidence continuum, the Design Discovery process focuses on ensuring that product experiences both deliver and capture value, moving from lower to higher confidence levels in our decisions.

By anchoring our design discovery in prototyping and customer evidence, we've cultivated an environment where the value loop has the loudest voice in what we do, and every design iteration brings us more confidence that we're moving from opinion to data-supported outcomes.

Case study: Designing for value outcomes at Outshift

We put this design discovery process to work recently in how we approached our latest venture in the GAI space, where the pace of change is swift and adaptability is key. 

In the initial stages of the project, the team identified a promising idea with potential market viability. The design role was to transform this early idea into a tangible and testable product hypothesis. This began with workshops where we collaborated cross-functionally to pinpoint the core value we needed to deliver. A critical aspect of this phase involved developing a detailed understanding of our potential user personas—an effort that guided opinions and our eventual hypothesis. 

We worked to ensure this initial hypothesis was grounded in value delivery and then documented an effective North Star Metric. This hypothesis served as the foundation for our prototype testing.

We initiated interviews with users who fit our ideal customer profile to evaluate our assumptions, using the feedback to iteratively refine both the hypothesis and the prototype. 

This process of continuous engagement with target users ensures ongoing improvements and alignment with user needs and the value loop, driving confidence that the product effectively fits market need.

Exploring this intersection of customer needs and our hypothesis is where our Design Discovery process truly shined. Specifically, it helped us to identify key areas where customer expectations intersect with our technological capabilities.

Our design Discovery Process emphasized alignment, user-centered design, and iterative testing to ensure we could validate both business and user needs effectively.

1. Initiation: Gathering Ideas
   1. Action: Define the core business problem and product vision.
   2. Takeaways: Establish a clear understanding of the problem to solve and the long-term goals.
2.  Inception: Alignment
   1. Action: Align the team on the value proposition for the user and the business assumptions to test.
   2. Takeaways: Ensure team consensus on the initial assumptions and the direction of the product development. 
3. Discovery Sprint: Feedback
   1. Action: Execute rapid prototyping and design sprints for concept validation.
   2. Takeaways: Gather immediate feedback to refine concepts and align with user needs.
4. Value Mapping: User Value
   1. Action: Map out the user value proposition based on feedback.
   2. Takeaways: Understand how the product will deliver value to the users in practical terms.
5. User Story Mapping: Implementing Value
   1. Action: Translate user journeys into detailed user stories and epics.
   2. Takeaways: Convert insights into actionable development tasks to create a user-centered product.

At the heart of our value analysis are the low and (eventually) high-fidelity prototypes we partner to create quickly. These prototypes were not just representations of the "user experience" but were data conduits, bringing in user feedback that honed the product's alignment with our North Star Metric and moved us along a confidence continuum.

This work led us to some key insights, including a product focus beyond security and governance to support a user’s rapid GAI experimentation as a key value attribute.

I believe this transformation from a hypothesis to prototyping a product steeped in evidence has been pivotal in positioning Outshift to deliver a GAI product that stands out for its relevance and innovation.

With GAI being such a rapidly evolving domain, where user needs and technological advancements are continually reshaping the landscape, our design process and prototype work has been our compass, helping accelerate alignment with a focus on end-customer value.

– Tushar Agrawal, Senior Director, Technical Product Management, GAI products 

Committed to innovation by design

Although we're still in the early stages, we're seeing tangible results in how we bring products and features to market. We've seen a measurable increase in efficiency and a decrease in time-to-market.

At the end of the day, our design journey is not just a change in process but a cultural transformation within Outshift, underlining our commitment to innovation, agility, and customer-centricity. Our commitment to this design process reinforces our mission to drive innovation through curiosity and transform ideas into action.

Interested in joining our team of innovators? Learn more about our open roles on the Outshift careers page.