An Overview of Sense And Respond
Sense & Respond provides a great explanation of what organizations should hope to get out of doing agile, digital and product transformations without beating you over the head with agile dogma.
A company I’m working with right now has a periodic product management book club meeting. For the last meeting, we discussed Sense & Respond, How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden.
I suggested Sense & Respond because it provides a great explanation of what organizations should hope to get out of doing agile, digital and product transformations without beating you over the head with agile practices and techniques.
Jeff and Josh organized the book into two parts.
Part one explains why organizations should adopt a sense and respond approach in a format that would make sense to business leaders. There are some helpful case studies in this part that provide examples why organizations become outcome focused.
Part two provides a playbook for making sense & respond happen at a high level. Although it does not provide a concrete step-by-step prescription as to exactly what to do. That was a little disappointing to some in the book club who are at the moment looking for specific direction on what they should do as product managers.
I had read Sense & Respond a few years ago, so to prep for this discussion, I went back through my notes and compiled the key points that I thought were the most important, listed below.
I’ve also pointed to some other reviews so you can get a few different perspectives on the book.
Five Key Principles of Sense and Respond
Create two-way conversations.
Digital technology gives you the ability to have two-way conversations with your users and customers. In order to unlock value, you need to understand the unexpressed and unmet needs of the people who use your products and services.
If you can continuously have these two-way conversations, you don’t have to try (and fail) to predict what will work. Instead you can listen, make an informed guess, get quick feedback, and adjust.
That’s why continuous discovery is so important.
Focus on the outcomes.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict what features your users and customers need. Yet you’re probably familiar with the quixotic attempt to plan your features and manage your business cycles as if you know exactly what will work, realized by specifying what outputs you’ll make.
Instead, you need to focus on outcomes. Leaders in your organization identify the business outcomes they wish to achieve and then position their teams to figure out how to get there. Those teams need an environment in which they can try different approaches, experiment, learn and discover what works through trial and error.
Leaders no longer dictate solutions, rather they ask teams to achieve an outcome.
Outcome-based roadmaps are a key tool for coordinating work between multiple product teams working to solve the same problem.
Embrace continuous change and continuous processes.
Modern development practices allow you to make minor changes in an ongoing way. You can make the adjustments you need to make when you’re using a sense and respond approach.
It also changes how you plan, because you’re continuously learning and adjusting your plans as you go.
It changes how you budget because it makes little sense to make commitments a year in advance when you’re learning every day.
It changes how you market, sell, and approach the entire product development life cycle.
Move away from big-batch processes and adopt small-batch, continuous processes, and adopt small-batch, continuous processes.
Create collaboration.
Great digital efforts are collaborations between a creator and their audience, developers and operations folks, designers and business stakeholders.
You need to embrace collaboration and break through barriers where you find them. That impacts how you organize your team, your departments, and your initiatives.
Create a learning culture.
Sense and respond means embracing continuous learning which requires significant changes to your process and organizational structures.
To make that kind of change, your organization has to build a learning culture that requires openness, humility, and permission to fail.
It means:
Supporting curiosity and collaboration
Being willing to admit you don’t really know the answer and an eagerness to find it
Embracing change and the idea that software is a continuous, mutable medium.
Reviews of Sense and Respond
PDMA - Teresa Jurgens-Kowal
Book Review: Sense and Respond
Key takeaway: All firms, regardless of manufacturing or service approach, are in the software business and need to engage in vibrant two-way conversations with their customers.
Hyung Park
Book Review: Sense and Respond
Sense and Respond is a common sense approach, with a focus in Design Thinking and Agile Development. The book includes many great examples of real life case studies and engages readers to think about how they can adopt sense & response processes of their own.
Sense and Respond is about engaging the market through two-way conversation.
Respond to market feedback through small batches, optimized for ongoing changes through agile development.
It is a self-directed process through continuous learning, leading to a correct path
Fostering a culture that is open to failure, and humility to admit what we don’t know
SHRM Victoria Hendrickson
Book Review: Sense and Respond
The book provides a compelling call to action for leaders. The authors’ emphasis on understanding and engaging with customers is clear, and their approach to doing so can be deceptively simple.
For leaders who are ready to recognize they are in the middle of a digital revolution—and brave enough to listen, learn, sense and respond—this is a valuable framework and playbook.
Sense and Respond is a must-read for leaders who are ready to build such a culture, as well as the employees who will implement it, because they will be the ones who will be directly sensing and responding to customers.
Savannah Group
Sense and Respond: How to Deliver Outcomes not Outputs
Key Takeaways:
Agile organizations move through the feedback loop quickly, delivering the smallest thing possible, sensing how it affects customer behavior and responding accordingly. That means within days, hours or even minutes.
One pillar of Sense and Respond is measuring outcomes. A mindset switch away from measuring against outputs and deliverables is key to determining whether you’re generating real value.
Thinking like a software company isn’t just for tech companies. Traditional and legacy organizations can build a continuous conversation with their customers if their leaders embrace the sense and respond model.
Want to read Sense and Respond?
If you’d like to dig in more to Sense and Respond, you can get a hardcover copy at Bookshop.org (and support your local bookstore) or an ebook copy at Amazon. (These are affiliate links)
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Kent J. McDonald Founder | KBP.Media