The book Sense and Respond is about listening to customers, using experimentation, and learning to build great products. It shows how an agile mindset can be applied throughout organizations, both by business managers and developers, to create a digital business.
I did an interview with the book authors Jeff Gothelf and Joshua Seiden about the major obstacles to building organizations that learn continuously, how to overcome them, how organizations can manage on outcomes using agile methods, what organizations can do to enable effective experimentation and learning, and how managers can create an environment where professionals can align their work and collaborate effectively. You can read it on InfoQ: Q&A on the Book Sense and Respond.
15 quotes from Sense and Respond
Here’s a set of 15 quotes from the book Sense and Respond. I’m tweeting these quotes with #SenseRespond.
Often, we fail to make a fundamental reassessment of the way we manage our business as a whole in the era of digital technology
All great digital efforts are collaborations—between a creator and the audience
We no longer have the luxury of ignoring technology—or leaving it to the technologists
In the digital world, there is no longer any “manufacturing.”
Value is not what we say it is: it’s what our customers say it is
The team mentality must start at the executive level
Successful sense and respond companies find people who want to work this way
Responding to consumer feedback is no longer optional
If there’s one thing the digital economy has clearly redefined, it’s our ability to play on a global scale
The most common way to organize teams so that they can respond quickly is to use agile methods
managing our projects in terms of outputs is simply not an effective strategy in the digital world
The easiest way to get people working together is to put them in the same room
Marketing teams have to adjust to a world in which product features are frequently unknown until just prior to release
Empathy helps us find a path through uncertainty
There will be failure and success, and hopefully you can embrace them both
Listen to Customers
In one of my first blog posts, we are all customers, I explained how interaction with customers can make a difference and lead to great products. Put yourself in their shoes to see the value that you can deliver to them.
The book Sense and Respond is all about business agility. If you want to assess how well you are doing and find ways to improve your agility, then the new Business Agility Expansion pack for the Agile Self-assessment Game is there to help you. Play this game together, developers and business people, to find ways to collaborate more effectively and deliver the stuff that your customers really need.
If you want to find out what your teams can do to build great products, then I suggest doing the building awesome products exercise in your retrospective. This exercise comes from the chapter Improve Software Quality with Retrospectives of my 2nd book What Drives Quality.
