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

by Jeff Gothelf

There are, of course, technology projects that are suited to outsourcing. Not every technology project faces the same level of uncertainty. Projects with low uncertainty (about what to build and what will work) are candidates for outsourced or offshore teams. One way we’ve seen this work is with so-called two-track agile approaches. In two-track agile, two tracks of work act in coordination. The first track is the experiment track. This team uses all the sense and respond techniques described in this book to take on the high-uncertainty portions of the work and figure out what solution works best. From there, the solution can be passed off to a second track—the production track—and this team implements the solution in a robust way. This arrangement works best when the hand-off between the teams is not a document, specification, or contract, but rather a working prototype that has been produced in the final delivery technology. Two-track agile has the benefit of allowing one team to move quickly to discover market needs, and another team to work at a more measured pace to handle security, internationalization, scale, and other concerns. But doing it well is tricky. It risks generating some of the old problems we face with assembly line work: that information may not flow back to the product team in a timely fashion and that it will reduce the rate of change that’s possible. It also isolates the production track, costing it the opportunity to get a preview of (or the ability...