Patton's Customer Outcomes

Jeff Patton proposed a simple five stage progression of customer outcomes, particularly suitable to consumer-oriented software products:

  1. Find it
  2. Try it
  3. Use it
  4. Keep using it
  5. Say good things

This model shows a progression of levels of engagement of customers with a product, and can be a good alternative to pirate metrics and similar methods for designing customer funnels.

Patton’s model is intentionally focused on customer outcomes, not on the mission/vision of the people making a product. The purpose of this is to emphasise customer goals and needs over satisfying the needs or opinions of stakeholders managing a product. Because of that, Patton’s outcomes model excludes levels such as the “revenue” or “scale” from alternative models.

This makes the model useful for early stage product development (levels 1-3 from Five Stages Of Growth). Later stage products, where the focus shifts more to value extraction and consolidation, are effectively outside the scope of this model. Business impacts are implied as a positive consequence of getting customers through the engagement funnel, but are not explicitly planned or handled within this model.

(An important side-note about terminology: Patton uses the term “Outcomes” solely for the aspects of value that customers and users care about. He uses “Impact” for the aspects of value the product makers or operators care about, such as revenue, referrals, operating costs and so on. In the Value Exchange Loop terminology, outcomes would be value delivered, and Impacts would be value captured.)

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Alternatives to the Patton's Customer Outcomes

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