I appreciate the thinking here, as I’m frequently helping re-align marketing organizations away from defining success as faster/more marketing deliverables and towards key performance indicators of outcomes from those marketing deliverables.

Being an Agile coach, I apply the principles of the user stories like you recommend for impact mapping. Using a threaded story arc, marketers can reimagine content delivery as being strategically aligned so that both the activity of the user is measurable (metric), and the tracking of those actions can lead to conversions. In this way, threaded content helps to convert users into prospects, and prospects into Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), with the goal of creating Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs for B2B) or even direct purchases (B2C).

The coordination of creating content which follows this threaded story arc is not linear but always connected so that users can insert themselves at any point and still end up with enough information to build awareness, engagement, and eventual adoption of a brand. Reverse-engineering this customer journey is one of the main ways outcome-based results are mapped back to each stage of the journey and the prioritization of work to deliver on that journey.

Thanks for sharing, Tim; your post is one I will be using to demonstrate outcome-based thinking outside of marketing.