There wasn't really anything I disagreed with in this. At the same time, there was nothing here that made me have an "aha" moment about how a company could really use this to improve, and worse, it avoided most of the "in the trenches" difficulties that make managing by outcomes instead of outputs (sometimes) very difficult in practice, especially in software.

In any moderately complex software product in a medium-to-large company, you're talking about teams, not just a singular team. You want folks to have as much freedom as possible, but at the same time, there needs to be a high degree of coordination and planning between teams, especially when it comes to software. You want to "change the balloon from red to blue" to use an example from the article? But what about the marketing team that already sent out the teaser video with the red balloon?

Honestly, one of the most demoralizing things I've seen affect software teams is not micromanagement, but what I call "whiplash" management, where priorities and directions change so frequently that teams feel like they have to spend more time replanning that actually building outputs.