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

by Jeff Gothelf

They pulled in the salespeople and traders who would be working on the service, and they pulled in the engineering team members who would be building it. This war room was very different from the earlier one. It’s wasn’t an engineering-only room or even a product-team-only room. It housed a self-sufficient business team. This team, working in a series of collaborative design sessions, sketched the outlines of a service that would be delivered, at least initially, mostly through human agents, backed up by a small amount of software. Over time, as they confirmed that the service was working as imagined, the team members planned to shift more of the functionality into the software in order to allow the service to scale. And it worked. The team launched the service in a matter of months, to positive reaction in the market, and was able to scale it up through frequent follow-up releases in the subsequent year.