benefitsled

Benefits-led is a decision-making approach that prioritizes the expected benefits or outcomes of a project, program, or product over intermediate outputs or activities. The aim is to maximize net positive impact for stakeholders and society, often through explicit benefit articulation.

Core practices include defining desired benefits, establishing measurable indicators and targets, identifying beneficiaries, estimating costs and risks, and designing to maximize benefits while controlling for unintended consequences. It often uses a benefits map or logic model to connect activities to outcomes and impacts.

Applications include public policy and procurement, program management, product design, and corporate strategy. In procurement, benefits-led approaches evaluate bids based on the extent to which proposed solutions deliver defined benefits, rather than price alone. In product development, teams focus on user- or customer-valued outcomes.

Benefits-led approaches can improve alignment with strategic goals, accountability, and resource efficiency, and facilitate monitoring and evaluation. Challenges include difficulty quantifying intangible benefits, attribution of outcomes to specific actions, data collection requirements, and longer planning horizons.

Related concepts include outcomes-based management, benefit-cost analysis, value-based management, impact assessment, and logic models.