Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously

by Jeff Gothelf

Platforms offer mature, stable infrastructure from which you can build products and services that reach millions. These products generate insight, thanks to the data you can collect from your systems. So the final piece of the puzzle isn’t really about technology. It’s about people—specifically, the people in your organization. Are you set up in a way that allows you to respond? Can your speed of response match your speed of insight? We’re not talking about how fast you can make things, but rather how fast you can decide to make things. Changing the speed with which you can respond to new insight is all about decision making. These decisions must reflect the pace at which information flows in. To do that, an organization has to trust that its managers will make the right decisions. The people best positioned to make real-time decisions (i.e., to respond to incoming data) are the people actually making the product or carrying out the policy change. No one has a greater level of investment than these frontline execution staff. They’re the closest to the market and are likely to have the greatest insight about how to respond. Companies that give these teams the freedom to respond quickly, without bureaucracy, enable a pace of work that unlocks all the technical capability available in our twenty-first-century market.