Why we put outcome before experience at SPORTA

By Andrew Smith, CEO and Founder at SPORTA

Businesses lose sight of their customers more often than they would like to admit, and it rarely happens on purpose. Nobody walks into a boardroom and suggests forgetting about the people they serve, something else just gets put ahead of them. The customer is still thought about, but they are no longer the first thing anyone considers.

I’ve seen this happen in technology companies and in regulated firms, for quite different reasons. In this blog I want to explain how we try to avoid it at SPORTA, and why it shapes what we build.

When technology comes first

In technology companies, it’s usually the technology itself that takes over, and in particular how clever or new it is.

Engineers fall in love with what they’ve built, the company falls in love with its engineers, and before long the business is working backwards from the technology to look for a customer problem it can fix.

Steve Jobs described the right approach at Apple’s developer conference in 1997, when he said you have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.

Blockchain is the example I come back to most often. The technology has real value and I’m not knocking it, but for a long time a lot of effort went into finding problems for it to solve, rather than starting with a customer’s problem and asking what would solve it best. Sometimes that would have been blockchain and often it wouldn’t, but starting with the technology made it very hard to tell which.

When compliance comes first

In regulated firms, compliance is often what gets put first. People worry about getting things wrong, and processes get built to prove that every box was ticked.

That’s an odd place to end up, because regulation exists to protect customers and make sure they get a good result. A firm that loses sight of the customer in the name of compliance has lost sight of what the compliance was for in the first place.

You see it in forms nobody can follow and in onboarding journeys built to protect the firm rather than help the person using them. They may well be compliant, but they’re a pain to use.

Outcome versus experience

Underneath how we work is a distinction between experience and outcome, two things that often get treated as if they were the same.

Experience is how it feels to use something: whether it’s quick, clear and easy, and maybe even enjoyable. Outcome is what actually changes for the customer as a result, such as a club getting paid on time, a volunteer spending less of their evening on admin, or a family finding somewhere for their children to play.

It’s possible to have a lovely experience and a poor outcome. A slick app that leaves a club no better off is just a nicer way of wasting someone’s time. It’s equally possible to get a good outcome through a dreadful experience, and a lot of well-meaning financial services work exactly like that.

At SPORTA we put outcome first.

Why outcome comes first

Building for the right outcome is what creates real value for the customer, and everything else we do depends on that.

Experience then does a different job, which is keeping people with us. A good experience is the reason someone finishes onboarding instead of giving up halfway, and the reason they keep opening the app. If it gives them what they need and is easy, even enjoyable, to use, they will use it more.

Value for customers is what builds the business, and a growing business is good for shareholders. In my experience, if you look after the customer the rest follows, and I have never seen it work the other way round.

Who we mean by customers

When we talk about customers we deliberately mean a long list of people: sports clubs, committed club members, governing bodies, leagues and championships, volunteers, coaches, professional players, parents and, of course, fans.

What connects them is our mission. SPORTA exists to make sport financially sustainable and available to all. That means financial inclusion for everyone involved, from the clubs and volunteers to the fans who fill the grounds and keep the game going.

The need is real. 80% of sports clubs fail to break even, and close to £100bn in social and economic value is being lost to the UK as a result. Behind those figures are volunteer treasurers working late on spreadsheets and clubs that don’t make it to the next season.

The counterargument

Some people will say this approach is too cautious. Plenty of big breakthroughs started with someone obsessing over what a technology could do long before anyone knew what it was for, and if everyone waits for customers to ask, nothing new gets built.

That’s a fair challenge, but putting the customer outcome first doesn’t mean waiting for customers to tell you what to build. There’s the line attributed to Henry Ford, which he probably never said, that if he’d asked people what they wanted they would have said a faster horse. What I take from it is that the outcome people wanted was to get places faster. Nobody was asking for a car, but the car is what met that need.

So I don’t agree with the counterargument. Curiosity about technology is how you find out what’s possible, and we want plenty of it. It just shouldn’t be what decides what we build. Before anything goes ahead we ask who it’s for and what will change for them, and if we can’t answer that clearly, the idea stays in the lab until we can.

What this looks like day to day

In practice, every product conversation at SPORTA starts with a person and the outcome they need rather than with a feature. Before we build anything, we ask what a good result looks like for a volunteer treasurer, a parent paying subs or a club trying to borrow money for a new roof. How sophisticated the solution needs to be is a question for later.

We will use the best technology we can find wherever it helps, but it is never our starting point.

Keeping the customer in front

Technology will keep getting cleverer and regulation will keep getting more detailed. That’s fine, as long as neither of them ends up in the front seat.

Our job is to keep the customer there, with the right outcome first, a great experience second, and a business that grows because we get both right.

Without passion you miss the mission, and if we miss the mission then we miss the opportunity.