From the desk of DJ Rob (our CEO)



One afternoon my Co-Founder shared with me a story, really more of a light bulb moment he had a few years prior prompting him to pursue this notion of outcomes. While attending a conference, he heard a speaker talk about selling swimming pools through websites. What the speaker explained is that he knew which content and leads generated his best sales results. By tracking the source of a sale and attributing the lead source he could easily identify what needed attention or deserved further investment because its success would generate more sales. He then explained to me that, if we know the outcome and work our way backward, we can identify the successful journey leading to that outcome. I then realized we could then monitor its relationship and performance to pinpoint friction in the product, technology, or content, and even measure its impact on the outcome. 

As that conversation unfolded the epiphany we had was that all of the Analytics and Observability data collected and presented is looking at the world from the beginning to the unknown outcome, which is still undetermined. The proliferation of event data is in hyper-growth adding to both overload and vendor costs in generating it. So in that same conversation it hit us both: Why don’t we turn that on its head and start from the outcome mapping all of the digital activity that led up to it? Everything else is ultimately noise until we have the context about the outcome and all of the related activity surrounding it. Sounds simple enough, so why is no one else doing it? Truth is, many hint around it, but it’s not a core function of their product suite. As it turns out, to make the change would require a significant shift from their product strategy. In fact, a year into our product development we needed to rewrite our Software Development Kit (SDK) to capture a key component of contextual data needed to be strategically and competitively differentiated. 

That component enabled us to structure the data in such a way that we can generate guidance for the end-user instead of just throwing more data and charts at them hoping they can find something useful. More importantly, this guidance quickly aligns all constituencies from the C-suite to Marketing to Sales, and Product to DevOps around the priorities that will “move the needle” for their digital business. “Guidance centered on digital business outcomes” was the second lightning strike in subsequent conversations giving birth to our idea that we are building a new category called Outcome-Centric GuidanceTM. OCG was a huge development as we continued to build on our vision and strategy for forming a company, more importantly what the product suite will accomplish for our future customer base. So we formulated a few slides around the concept and tried it out on some friends to get their reactions. At first the responses were a bit mixed, but as we refined the message that quickly evolved into highly effective conversations with CEO’s and engineers. Wow! Who would have thought that essentially the same slide deck could be used for both groups and have them react positively saying, “We want to try that out!”

Outcome-Centric GuidanceTM, at first glance, takes some getting used to given that most Analytics and Observability tools are hyper-focused on ingesting data and visualizing it, leaving the interpretation to the customer. However, the further we dug into the use cases the more we realized that OCG is a complement to, versus a complete replacement of the analytics teams and tools. Further development of our use cases led us to significantly broaden the list of vendors we consider as partners or competitors: for example, product management and customer experience tools that rely on journey mapping for end-user analytics are competitors while observability would be a partner.

There is so much more to this story, but I hope you are already catching the vision and revolutionary thinking about how to evolve your digital business strategy on the foundation of Outcome-Centric GuidanceTM