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By Lynne Feldstein, COO

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There’s a version of good delivery that I’ve become slightly wary of. The kind where everything gets done, the strategy gets executed, and at the end of it you find yourself wondering whether any of it actually moved the needle.

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This is something I think about a lot as COO at Virtual, Inc. — and something I suspect anyone leading a membership organization or tech consortium will recognize. It shows up wherever there are programs to run, members to engage, and teams working hard in good faith on things that feel important but aren’t always connected back to what actually needs to change.

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The uncomfortable truth I keep coming back to is this: delivering what is asked for and delivering what is actually needed are not always the same thing. And the gap between them is where a lot of well-intentioned effort quietly disappears.

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Finding the gap

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At Virtual, we design everything around outcomes. Not because it’s a nice principle to put on a website, but because I’ve seen what happens when you don’t. When a team is optimizing for completion rather than impact, they get incredibly good at the wrong things. The work looks fine. The reporting looks fine. But the outcome — the actual change the client was trying to drive — doesn’t quite materialize. The root cause is almost always the same: the team understood the what, but not the why. They knew what had been asked for. They didn’t fully understand what it was in service of. And without that, every decision gets made against the wrong frame.

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When your team understands the why, they make better decisions at every level — including the decision to push back when what’s being asked for isn’t what’s actually needed.

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For membership organizations and tech consortia, the stakes of activity without purpose can be even higher. Your members notice. A program that generates a lot of noise but doesn’t genuinely serve their needs isn’t just a missed opportunity — it’s a signal about what you value. And members, who have chosen to invest in belonging to something, are paying close attention to whether that investment is being honored.

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What designing for outcomes actually requires

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But here’s the part that I think gets underestimated: you can’t design for outcomes at the top of an organization and then run activity-focused operations underneath it. The whole team has to understand what they’re working towards and why it matters. Not just the people in the room when the strategy is set — everyone whose decisions shape the work.

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When people understand the why, they make smarter calls, flag the right things, and bring genuine investment to the work. When they don’t, people default to doing what they were told rather than what’s needed.

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The question I’d invite you to sit with

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If you’re leading a membership organization or tech consortium, I’d ask: when you look at what your team is spending its time on right now, how much of it connects clearly to the outcomes that matter most to your members? And does your whole team — not just your leadership — understand why those outcomes matter?

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I ask the same question of our team at Virtual. It’s not always a comfortable one. But it’s the right one.

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The best client relationships we have are the ones where both sides are focused on the same outcome — and both sides feel genuinely invested in getting there.

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That alignment — between what we’re doing and why it matters, between our team’s effort and our clients’ actual needs — is what I’m always working towards as COO. It’s also what I look for in the partnerships that tend to go the distance.