Leading metrics tied directly to the top-line business metric (revenue, margin) that leadership is already measured on. A product team is funded and evaluated against a predictive indicator instead of against a feature spec or roadmap item — the indicator becomes the team's accountability target.
Practically: identify and quantify the indicator with the team first, then fund the team against moving it. This operationalizes the funding half of the Output-to-Outcomes Shift Triad and gives Outcome-Based Roadmap Reframing a concrete metric to reframe roadmaps around.
Biddle gives a concrete proxy-metric example: instead of waiting years to see whether a change moves long-term retention/churn, Netflix tracked the percent of customers watching 15+ minutes of streaming video per month as a faster-moving leading indicator plausibly predictive of that slower outcome. Optimizing the proxy in the near term stood in for optimizing the true, slow-moving outcome metric.