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

by Jeff Gothelf

The vendor can make the website, deliver it on time and on budget, even make it beautiful to look at and easy to use, and it may still not achieve our goal, which is to sell more of our products online. The website is the output. The project may be “done.” But if the outcome—sell more products—hasn’t been achieved, then we have not been successful. This may seem rather obvious, but if you look at the way most companies manage digital product development, you’d be hard- pressed to see these ideas in action. That’s because most companies manage projects in terms of outputs and not outcomes. This means that most companies are settling for “done” rather than doing the hard work of targeting success.