Comparisons

Pairs that get conflated in real conversations. Neither column wins — what decides is the situation. Each record leads with the confusion, because the confusion is the reason the record exists.

Outcome vs output First version vs prototype Decision record vs one-pager Success metric vs guardrail Reversible vs irreversible decisions Feature flag vs long-lived branch Numbers vs conversations Incident vs bug

Outcome vs output

What people get wrong about this pair

Teams report output because it is always measurable and always true. "Shipped on Thursday" cannot be wrong. Outcomes can fail, so they get quietly dropped from the update, and the team optimises what it reports.

Outcome

Use it when

To decide whether the work mattered and whether to invest more.

Output

Use it when

To plan capacity and track delivery — it is not nothing, it is just not the goal.

Aspect	Outcome	Output
What it answers	Did anything change for someone?	Did we deliver what we said?
When you know	Weeks after launch, from a number or a ticket queue	The moment it merges
Who is on the hook	The person who chose to build it	The person who built it
Failure looks like	A feature nobody uses, reported honestly	A missed date