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

by Jeff Gothelf

By building road maps around customer-centered journey maps, the Westpac team uses customer experience as a key dimension around which they align. This is a little bit different from the other examples we’ve shared in this chapter. Those teams used organizing principles that are more obviously based on business outcomes. There are advantages to organizing around customer experience, though, especially if it tracks to the strategic goal. At Westpac, this is indeed one of the strategic goals. It can be hard to create a great customer experience in an agile context. One of the frustrations we see in some organizations that work in an agile way is something called experience debt, or design debt. Similar to technical debt (an engineering term for the engineering housekeeping-type work that is useful but never gets prioritized and thus builds up over time), experience debt comes from the small design problems that build up over time and reduce the quality of the user experience: a confusing instruction here, an extra pop-up window there. Designers want to be able to go back and improve things by iterating: working on the feature again. But project owners, whose performance is sometimes measured by how many features they release, may feel pressure to move forward to the next feature. Muir points out that neither choice is inherently right or wrong. “It’s a value trade-off,” he told us. Muir says that the journey maps help make this choice visible. Teams can look at the map, see ...