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

by Jeff Gothelf

Perhaps the most important change you need to make in terms of collaboration is helping the team itself to reimagine its work flow. This kind of collaboration typically requires team members to change the way they accomplish their individual work. Product managers may be accustomed to creating detailed plans and business cases; they need to change their approach to one of asking questions and running experiments. Designers may be good at working out each pixel in Photoshop; they need to become comfortable facilitating team design sessions at the whiteboard. Developers may be used to working from detailed requirements documents; they must get used to starting with much sketchier inputs. And everyone needs to get used to the idea that change and rework are valuable parts of the process, instead of costs to be avoided. According to PayPal’s Bill Scott, reflecting on one reason his teams at his former employer, Netflix, were so successful, “I realized that, especially in the UI layer, we were throwing out 90 percent of the code we wrote in a given year.”7 The team there bought into the idea of continuous improvement: it’s not that team members were writing bad code but that they thought of the code they were writing as simply a learning tool. It was part of the team’s ongoing effort to find the right solution.