Your Backlog Is Not a Strategy: How To Make Outcomes Visible To The Business

I can usually tell whether a product team is truly outcome driven without talking to a single person.

Give me five minutes in your Jira backlog.

If I walk out of that view with no idea what problem you own, what business result you are on the hook for, or even what capabilities you are building, that is not a tooling issue. That is a leadership issue.

We All Know Better. So Why Do We Still Run Feature Factories?

We have all read the books and articles about being responsible for outcomes, not just output. We study frameworks, we roll out OKRs, we talk about product teams as mini businesses. Folks like Marty Cagan at SVPG have written in detail about how hard this shift really is, and why outcomes require a true product operating model, not just a new vocabulary. You can see that argument clearly in Outcomes Are Hard.

On paper, we get it. Product managers are supposed to drive measurable business impact, not just ship features. We are supposed to be masters of focus, ruthless prioritization, and strategic alignment.

Then you zoom into the day to day.

You are buried in scaled agile ceremonies and 30 hours of meetings a week. Requests pour in from customers, sales, success, operations. A leadership fire drill drops on you every other sprint. Roadmaps bloat. And even though you know better, your team ends up behaving like a very busy, very expensive feature factory.

What Your Jira Backlog Is Really Saying To The Business

When something feels this off, I like to start with my own work, not the culture, not the org chart.

If I opened your Jira backlog right now, as a product leader with more than 15 years in the role, here is what usually happens.

• I cannot tell what outcome your team is trying to move.
• I cannot see the impact you are aiming for, or the metric you care about.
• I probably cannot even explain, in plain language, what product or capability you are actually building.

Everything is buried inside hyper detailed, engineering level user stories. Your backlog is written for the engineers who are implementing it, not for you, and definitely not for your executive stakeholders.

Now imagine how that looks to your CFO or COO.

They sit in a review and hear that the project is green. They hear that you finished 13 features or 58 tickets. They see ticket throughput charts. From their perspective, work is clearly happening. Money is clearly being spent. But they walk out with almost no understanding of what changed for customers or for the business.

That confusion is not on them. It is on us.

As Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia at Product School points out in Outputs vs. Outcomes: A Costly Confusion, outputs are the artifacts we ship. Outcomes are the changes in user behavior and business results that those artifacts create. Jira, as we typically use it, is almost entirely optimized around outputs.

The 500 Ticket X Ray

Here is a thought experiment I like to run with leaders.

Take the last 500 tickets your teams completed across the business. No filtering, no cleanup, just the raw history of what actually shipped.

Now ask yourself, honestly:

• Could a smart outsider clearly explain what key features or capabilities were delivered from that list?
• Is it obvious why those things mattered, and why they were more important than everything you did not build?
• Can you tie each of those tickets to a strategic goal or OKR, in a way that would make sense to a finance leader?
• Is there any record of the impact those changes had on customer behavior or core business metrics?
• Do you know what percentage of those tickets were planned strategic work versus reactive requests, innovation bets, or pure technical debt?

For most teams, the answer to almost all of these questions is no.

The business, meanwhile, knows exactly what they are spending on product and engineering. They see the cost line. They see headcount. What they do not see is a simple, credible translation from that investment into outcomes.

I dig into this gap more in another piece, Are We Really Tracking Outcomes, but the short version is this: if your only source of truth is a wall of tickets, you have a visibility problem and, eventually, a trust problem.

Why This Gap Exists

This is not just a communication issue. It is structural.

• Our tools are tuned for execution, not strategy. Jira is excellent at tracking work items. It is terrible at telling a strategic story if you do not deliberately design for that.
• Our incentives often favor velocity over value. When teams are praised for ticket throughput, they optimize for it. The work becomes about motion, not impact. I talk about this shift from speed to substance in From Velocity to Value.
• We rarely learn to speak business. Many product managers can discuss acceptance criteria in detail, but struggle to explain a roadmap in the language of revenue, margin, retention, or cash flow. So they retreat to the safety of feature lists.

The result is a chronic misalignment. Product teams are convinced they are driving strategy. Executives experience them as ticket factories that cannot clearly connect their work to outcomes.

Four Practical Shifts To Make Outcomes Visible

The good news is you do not need a reorg or a new framework to start fixing this. You can begin with how you frame and communicate the work you already do.

1. Put outcomes at the top of the stack

Every team should be able to answer, in one sentence, what outcome they own this quarter. Not a feature. Not a project name. A measurable change in behavior or business performance.

Atlassian offers a useful distinction between business and product outcomes in their guide on outcome focused product teams. Business outcomes are lagging indicators such as revenue or churn. Product outcomes are leading indicators such as activation, task completion, or adoption of a workflow.

Make these outcomes explicit. Put them in Jira as fields or labels. Pin them at the top of every planning doc. Use SMART style phrasing so they are specific and measurable, similar to the guidance in Meegle's article on product manager goals for 2025.

2. Classify work, do not just queue it

Instead of treating every ticket as equal, give each item a simple classification at intake:

• Strategic initiative
• Customer reactive
• Innovation experiment
• Technical debt or reliability

Then, once a month, look at the mix. If 80 percent of your capacity is going to reactive requests and tech debt, you are not going to move strategic outcomes, no matter how hard the team works.

This does not require a new system. It requires discipline and a willingness to look at what is actually happening instead of what you wish were happening.

3. Report like a business owner, not a project manager

When you report up, do not lead with ticket counts or Gantt charts.

Lead with three things:

• The outcome you committed to.
• What you shipped to drive that outcome.
• What changed for customers or the business so far.

This is where storytelling matters. Executives remember clear, causal narratives: here is the problem, here is what we did, here is what changed, here is what we learned. If you need a deeper dive on this, I unpack it in Moving Beyond Execution: How Storytelling Elevates Product Leaders.

4. Keep a simple, human level view of the product

Alongside your detailed backlog, maintain a living one page view of your product:

• The core jobs or workflows you support.
• The key capabilities you are building or evolving this quarter.
• The customer and business outcomes those capabilities target.

This is not a spec. It is a map. Something you can put in front of any executive, new hire, or partner and say: this is what we are doing and why it matters.

It connects the granular world of tickets to the larger narrative of how the product creates value, which is exactly the bridge most organizations are missing. I explore that bridge more broadly in Navigating the Product Life Cycle.

The Real Job: Translating Work Into Outcomes

None of this is about adding more process. It is about taking ownership of the translation layer between product work and business understanding.

Your executives do not need to know how many tickets you closed last sprint. They need to know what changed for customers, how that change shows up in metrics they care about, and why the next set of bets on your roadmap is the best use of scarce capacity.

So here is the question I would leave you with.

If you pulled the last 500 tickets your teams delivered and put them on the table in front of your CEO, could you tell a clear, confident story about what outcomes you created for the business?

If the answer is no, do not blame the culture or the framework. Start by changing how you, as a product leader, see, structure, and explain the work.

That is where real outcome driven product management begins.