Christian's reframing of what a Product Model (vs. Roadmap Model) transformation actually changes, expressed as three paired shifts:
Distinct from SVPG's Three-Axis Transformation Diagnostic (Build / Solve / Decide) (build / discover / decide), which describes the activities that change; this triad describes the management relationship that changes — what leaders measure, how they fund, and how much solution-space autonomy they hand down. Useful as a checklist when diagnosing whether an organization's current operating model still rewards output over impact.
"My job is to grow revenue... growing revenue is not a project."
Karina Stukan names the third stage explicitly as "impact": output (the thing shipped) → outcome (the behavior change) → impact (the translation into business/financial terms). She argues impact is the piece most often missing from product communication — teams narrate output and outcome fluently but stop short of stating what it's worth to the business, which is exactly the "fluffy" mode she later self-critiques (e.g., "improve onboarding so customers are less frustrated" without a revenue or acquisition tie-in).
She also traces a historical cause for why teams default to output/outcome without impact: product management used to sit closer to outcomes (bundling product, packaging, sales, and go-to-market together), then drifted toward backlog- and delivery-execution work as a separate function — severing the natural line to business impact. She frames the field as now correcting back toward business context. This compounds a second structural cause: organizations often hire and structure product roles around delivery rather than outcomes, and separately fail to share real business goals and numbers with teams — see Air Sandwich (Strategic Context Gap).
Cagan uses several interchangeable pairings for the same reframe, picking whichever lands with a given audience: output → outcomes, projects → products, time to market → time to money, and feature teams/order takers → empowered product teams/problem solvers. See Product Model (vs. Roadmap Model), Product Team (Five-Trait Definition).
Marty Cagan uses three parallel reframes of the same underlying shift, each aimed at a different audience:
Same underlying idea, three vocabularies for three audiences: engineering/product (output→outcomes), PMO/program-management orgs (projects→products), and finance (time-to-market→time-to-money).
Related: Product Model (vs. Roadmap Model), Outcome-Based Roadmap Reframing.