<aside> ℹ️ Template v1.0 by Kate Callahan. Inspired by the book Outcomes Over Output by Josh Seiden. To use this template, duplicate it to your workspace and save it to your project’s folder. Customize the database properties with your own business result tags and priorities, if needed.

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The 3 Magic Questions at a glance

Q1 - What are the user/customer behaviors that drive business results?

Think about the high-value interactions that power your business through sales, upsells, referrals, or loyalty. Avoid the temptation to focus on features! Features are outputs, but business results are the outcomes.

Q2 - How could we get people to do more of those behaviors?

For the sake of speed, just capture the change or idea, not an entire hypothesis statement. There’s an example entry in the table, if that helps.

Q3 - How do we know if we’re right?

In other words, how will you measure the desired behaviors?

Leading = metrics that indicate the behavior might happen

Lagging = metrics that tell you the behavior has happened

How to use the questions

  1. Review your business goals or OKRs. These should inspire both your desired outcomes and priorities.
  2. Alone or in a small group, use the Brainstorming view in the database below to brainstorm the important customer behaviors that help your business thrive and hit its goals.
  3. Fill out the Q1 and Business results columns at first. (If you want to edit the Business Results tags, click the column title and go to Edit property then click +.) If you can’t easily tag a behavior with business results that matter, just delete it. When you feel like you have a good list, fill in the other columns.
  4. Assign a Priority to each row in the table based on business priorities. This is where it helps to review your goals! For the sake of simplicity, only change the priority tags if you need to match your team’s way of talking about it.
  5. Fill in Q2 and Q3 columns for your high priority ideas. Don’t spend time on the low priority ideas for now—they’ll stay in your database as a sort of backlog.
  6. If you’re sharing with a stakeholder, use the other views to show what business results you have ideas about or what you decided to work on (Ideas by Status). Don’t overwhelm them with an unfiltered list!
  7. OPTIONAL: track your experiments and results using Notion’s free experiment tracker template.