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

by Jeff Gothelf

Building an Outcome-Based Road Map The first part of the work involved senior leaders, who created a list of strategic themes for the coming year. These themes would be the top-down guidance—the coordinating ideas that would serve as the rudder for the ship. Strategy is about choices. It’s as much about what you don’t do as what you choose to do. So for this year, following a period of intense focus on one segment of customers, the executives chose to focus on a different segment, one they felt had been underserved previously. From this focus, the leaders created a number of smaller themes, including a focus on the mobile experience. (Stephen Bungay points out that a good strategy statement often “looks banal” to outsiders. The value comes from the alignment you create through the continuous process of articulating the strategy.)4 With the top-down strategic themes prepared, all the delivery teams were asked to create a list of initiatives they wanted to work on in the coming year. This was the bottom-up part of the process. The list came from the front line, the cross-functional team members who knew the most about the product, the customers, and the users. These were expert, informed opinions, deeply rooted in the situation on the ground. The teams also had to provide an estimate of the specific, measurable business outcomes they believed each initiative would create. Next, the product leaders in the middle management layer needed to figure out how to coordinate the effo...