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

by Jeff Gothelf

Sandboxes, blameless postmortems, and other safe-to-fail learning tactics mitigate the big risks organizations face. They allow teams to learn and to respond to changing conditions. They do this by encouraging small amounts of risk. It’s a trade-off that many organizations find difficult to accept. Instead, many organizations push toward increased process control in order to mitigate all risks. This approach mixes up different kinds of risk. It sees small operational risks and seeks to control them absolutely, while remaining blind to the big existential risks. When you increase operational process control, you decrease the freedom your teams experience. As your teams believe they have less freedom to deviate from “standard” processes, they will become less curious and seek increasingly safer solutions. It means they are likely to stay the same, even as markets shift, technology improves, and new paradigms emerge that challenge your position.

“Process brings seductively strong near-term outcomes.”6 As an alternative, Netflix values hiring responsible people and giving them permission to operate within constraints, with permission to fail, and thus it creates the opportunity for the individuals and the organization to grow and evolve.

In many ways, this approach embodies the work of Douglas McGregor’s famous theory X and theory Y of management.7 McGregor, a management professor in the mid-twentieth century and author of The Human Side of Enterprise, proposed that there are at least two discrete ways that managers think about employees and that these assumptions translate directly into management approaches. Theory X proposes that employees dislike work and that the only way to get them to deliver their work is through explicit control, direction, and threats. No sensing. No responding. No learning. This theory holds that employees will

Nevertheless, for information workers, thinking and decision making are the work. And, in a learning culture, we all become information workers. In this world theory X-style controls will drive an organization toward irrelevance faster than anything else.

This is what makes alignment with mission so important in a sense and respond world. Workers need to understand the mission, understand what it means to them, and see how their work connects to and contributes to achieving the mission.

“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”

Impossible to do in solation, co. must have team and corp. culture which provides for this.

“We believe that how we work is just as important as what we produce for our partners.

Product is a reflection of process.

Uncertainty is our enemy and obstacle. As we’ve already argued, in the information age we cannot always accurately predict the effect our actions will have. We cannot use Newtonian math to predict the behavior of our software products. Instead, we have to try things, test ideas, probe. In short, in order to move forward and gain clarity, we must act. One of the principles we wrote about in our first book, Lean UX, was that teams need to prioritize making over analysis. We encouraged product teams to make something—a prototype, an experiment, a customer interview—to get the information they were missing, rather than sit around the conference room debating the validity of an idea.

The same approach works at the management level.

As the way your company works shifts in response to the uncertainty technology brings, management must adopt a bias toward action, toward experiments that ...

teams that met with real customers for at least two hours per team member every six weeks produced superior products.12 In the study, Spool calls this key metric exposure hours, or the number of hours that each member of the team is exposed to customers. This last point is important. Teams that do a lot of research but in which only research specialists participate do not see this improvement in product quality.

Fourth, Maxdome has started a process it calls “dogfooding.” Derived from the phrase “eating your own dogfood,” this is the process of company employees using the service they are building on a regular basis

Collaboration is critical to sense and respond approaches. It starts with the idea that a small team, working in short, iterative cycles will need diverse skills.

One of the things that makes collaboration so powerful is that it combines people with different points of view and different skills to work on a problem together. The challenge, of course, is that the same thing that makes diversity so powerful can also serve as the root of conflict: different people have different values, make different assumptions, have different biases and prejudices, and bring different knowledge to the table. To turn this mix into a productive team rather than a free-for-all, you need to create some shared purpose, and you need to create trust.