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

by Jeff Gothelf

The top-down, change-resistant planning we see in the Fire Phone story is all too common. It’s the norm in large organizations. Most often it’s expressed in a document called a feature road map. This is a compelling document. It gives a clear sense of where we are, where we’re headed, and what features we’ll build to get from here to there. It provides a sense of progress and serves as a motivational tool for teams, managers, executives, and, often, external partners and stakeholders. It sets expectations about when features will be done. It’s also a complete fabrication. Imagine, for a second, the product manager for the Cooking Light Diet team committing to a feature road map at the beginning of the initiative. She would commit to a specific feature set, pricing strategy, and delivery dates. Then after each experiment and set of customer conversations, she would have to revise the road map and go back to her stakeholders to get it approved, each time watching as her credibility eroded. While this is happening, the team members would be waiting for approval, their productivity slowing to a crawl. Their learning would be causing problems. The alternative to feature road maps is to make looser plans and then adjust them as you learn.