Product Logic Model: Input, Output, Outcome

10 min readNov 12, 2023

Product Logic Model

A logic model is a graphic depiction (road map) that presents the shared relationships among the resources, activities, outputs, and outcomes/impacts for your product. It explains why your strategy is a good solution to the problem at hand. Effective logic models make an explicit, often visual, statement of the activities that will bring about change and the results you expect to see for the team.

A Logic Model is a product planning tool that allows you to define the inputs, outputs, and outcomes of a product to help explain the thinking behind product design and show how specific product activities lead to desired results. It’s a group’s “theory of change.”

Inputs are the resources needed, including the human, financial, organizational, and community resources a product has available to direct toward doing the work.
Activities are what your product does with the resources. Activities are the processes, tools, events, technology, and actions that are an intentional part of the product implementation. These activities are used to bring about the intended product changes or results.
Outputs are the direct products of product activities and may include types, levels, and targets of services to be delivered by the product.
Outcomes are the specific changes in product participants’ knowledge, skills, behavior, status, and level of functioning. Short-term outcomes should be attainable within 1 to 3 months, while longer-term outcomes should be achievable within a 4 to 6-month timeframe.
The impact is the fundamental intended or unintended change occurring in individuals or communities as a result of achieved short and long-term outcomes. When “read” from left to right, logic models describe product basics over time from planning through to results.

Uses of the logic model

One of the most important uses of the logic model is for product planning. It is suggested to use the logic model to focus on the intended outcomes of a particular product.

The guiding questions change from “What is being done?” to “What needs to be done”?

What is the current situation that we intend to impact?
What will it look like when we achieve the desired situation or outcome?
What behaviors need to change for that outcome to be achieved?
What knowledge or skills do people need before their behavior will change?
What activities need to be performed to cause the necessary learning?
What resources will be required to achieve the desired outcome?

By placing the focus on ultimate outcomes or results, planners can think backward through the logic model to identify how best to achieve the desired results. Here it helps managers to ‘plan with the end in mind’, rather than just consider inputs (e.g. budgets, employees) or the tasks that must be done.

The Inputs → Activities → Outputs → Outcomes template

What are outcomes

Product Outcomes Measure Human Behavior

Outcome: Outcomes are the changes you want to make through your services or activities

An outcome is the result of internal and external company actions. Many times, an organization desires certain business outcomes, meaning they are objectives that the company wishes to fulfill. For example, a business may seek to increase its customer retention, and improve profits or shareholder value.

To create effective desired business outcomes, you must define the goal using measurable figures, determine the time frame, and consider how the outcome affects both your organization and your client. Depending on the outcomes you establish, you may need to implement various strategies for reaching them. Assessing which processes within your organization most affect your business outcomes is how you can employ strategies for meeting your goals.

Why is it important to understand outcomes?

Outcomes are valuable for businesses because they help create deliverables to meet their objective. Other benefits of understanding your project outcomes include:

Determining if you met your business objectives
Learning lessons for future projects and identifying areas for improvement
Providing an overall purpose for your product experiments
Discovering ways to meet the needs of your business & users
Helping make sure all parts of the project serve the end goal

Progress = outcomes, not output

What is it? Features and services are outputs. The business goals they are meant to achieve are outcomes. Lean Product Management measures progress in terms of explicitly defined business outcomes.
Why do it? When we attempt to predict which features will achieve specific outcomes, we are mostly engaging in speculation. Although it’s easier to manage toward the launch of specific feature sets, we don’t know in any meaningful way whether a feature is effective until it’s in the market. By managing to outcomes (and the progress made toward them), we gain insight into the efficacy of the features we are building. If a feature is not performing well, we can make an objective decision as to whether it should be kept, changed, or replaced.

Benefits of determining desired outcomes

When determining your desired business outcomes, you define the goals you and your team are striving to meet. These are some benefits of establishing desired business outcomes:

Provide direction: By understanding the business outcomes you’re working for, you can make decisions with those outcomes in mind. This provides direction to management and simplifies business choices.
Prioritize tasks: In every business, there are some tasks that you prioritize over others. Determining your desired business outcomes allows you to emphasize the importance of tasks that align with those outcomes.
Create timeframes: Business outcomes are time-based, which allows you to create a timeframe by which to meet them. For example, a company may want to improve its customer retention rate by 5% by the end of the quarter.
Increase productivity: When your teams know what they are trying to improve and why it allows them to understand their work and may increase productivity. Defining your desired business outcomes allows management to encourage teams to meet them.

How to measure outcomes

Follow these steps when measuring your outcomes:

Define the outcome you want to achieve and consider what kind of impact you want your organization’s actions to have. To do this, review your company’s mission and the type of clients you currently serve. Also, consider what types of new clients you want to attract and how you want to make a difference with your product or services. Create a list of your desired outcomes to help guide you in future projects. When setting your outcome goal, make sure it’s SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based.
Design quantifiable measures to measure the success of your project outcomes, and design quantifiable measures that represent success in reaching your goals. For instance, if your project outcome is to reach more clients, consider setting a goal of increasing your client growth by a set percentage rate. Also, begin your project outcome statement with an action verb to describe what you plan to accomplish.
Access the relationship between your project outcomes and outputs review the outcomes of your project to see if you achieved them through your work or the project outputs. Sometimes a project output is successful but doesn’t accomplish your outcome. Review to see if the change you were hoping for happened. Consider using a logic model when measuring your outcomes to get a visual representation of your project to see if you reached your expected result.
Track your progress since project outcomes tend to have a broader impact, they may take a while before you see effects. Choose a method for tracking your progress. For instance, if you are trying to determine how many participants learn more from an educational workshop, consider giving a questionnaire to participants before and after the event so you can see how much they learned.
Review your outcomes once your project is complete, review your outcomes to determine what effect it had on your client. You can do this by taking data measurements and comparing them to your initial outcome goals at the start of the project. Based on your evaluation, you can make adjustments for future projects to create outputs with stronger effects on the outcome.

Where do outcomes come from?

If you are a product manager or product leader one of the ways outcomes reach you is by-product strategy.

Product strategy is made up of a lot of different moving parts that make up the overall direction of your product. You start with a solid product vision that includes your market plan and opportunity, customer and industry analysis, and product positioning. Then, you craft some product goals everyone can get behind.

Your product outcomes, whether they’re business outcomes, team outcomes, or operational outcomes, can’t leave room for doubt or misinterpretation. They should be a set of clear and specific objectives with measurable and achievable expectations.

Product managers use different methods to specify, measure, and deliver outcomes. Some PMs use different methods at the same time, depending on the needs of the team. Systems like MBO (Management By Objectives), KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable/action-oriented), and North Star metrics work well depending on the types of goals.

There’s one methodology that works well across all types of product goals: the OKR method. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) give you and your team a measurable success strategy. After all, having a great product strategy means nothing if you don’t define exactly how you’ll carry it out.

What is an OKR?

OKRs stand for “Objectives and Key Results.” It is a collaborative goal-setting methodology used by teams and individuals to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. OKRs are how you track progress, create alignment, and encourage engagement around measurable goals.

What are the components of an OKR?

The OKR Formula: OKRs are typically written with an Objective at the top and 3 to 5 supporting Key Results below it. They can also be written as a statement:

I will (Objective) as measured by (Key Results).

For example, “I will fix the website for the vast majority of people as measured by 7 out of 10 people being able to get through, a 1 second response time, and a 1% error rate.”

An Objective is simply what is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, Objectives are significant, concrete, action-oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking and ineffective execution.
Key Results benchmark and monitor how we get to the Objective. Effective KRs are specific time-bound and aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable.

When to use an OKR

You and your team can use OKRs to:

Clarify major goals according to department or discipline
Communicate clearly and focus on what’s important for cross-functionality
Practice transparency and simplify big ideas, so everyone understands how they contribute to bigger company goals and priorities
Sets up indicators for measuring progress, so that teams can adapt and adjust to change
Focus efforts, so everyone stays aligned and cross-collaborative and turn competitive initiatives into combined and consolidated efforts

Teams that commit to completing OKRs should ideally point their stakeholders to results based on funding allocated per quarter. The goal is to reduce risk, yet still set ambitious, bold quarterly goals, and focus on results over outcomes while putting value for both customer and business front and center.

🚀 OKR Example

Objective: Make our social media channels a hub for our community and prove its strategic value

Key Results

Increase share of social referral leads to 15%
Increase social referral traffic by 40%
Grow Facebook followers to 100,000
Grow Twitter followers to 30,000

Initiatives

Run 5 social ad campaigns on Facebook
Run 3 sweepstakes with giveaways on Facebook
Integrate CTAs into all social media posts
Publish 3–5 posts per week on Facebook and 1–2 per day on Twitter
Establish contact with at least 3 influencers and complete at least one collaboration

Outcome-focused objectives

While an output is what a team does, outcomes reflect the change that occurs based on what a team does. In many cases, building outcome-focused objectives requires you to shift from an activities-based mindset to an outcome-based one.

Outcome-focused objectives typically focus on:

Optimizing an existing practice or product
Building a new system
Defining stages of development

While not all objectives have to be outcome-focused, in many cases, an OKR will make clear what outcome will be achieved if the key results are achieved. Restructuring your objectives and goals with an outcome in mind develops an additional element of focus, transparency, and alignment.

For example, Allbirds, a New Zealand-American footwear company had a top-level objective to develop 100% carbon-emission-neutral products. The outputs in place to support that objective included tracking their emissions from the supply chain, their manufacturing, shipping, and retail operations. In the case of Allbirds, outcomes allow teams to shift their focus from progress to how progress is made.

In summary

Outcomes are the goals you want to achieve with your business, and output is the result of concrete activities or initiatives you undertake to make progress toward achieving those goals.

Input vs. Outputs vs. Outcomes

Input is what is needed to achieve a certain result — for example, financial, personnel-related, or time resources. All these “ingredients” are then transformed into output through activities.
Output describes the result achieved by a specific activity. It refers to a product, service, or other tangible result of working on a project.
Outcome takes this one step further: the term refers to the effect achieved with the output. In other words, outcome describes the actual added value that a product or service creates for the target group.