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10 reviews for:
Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously
Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden
3.81 AVERAGE
10 reviews for:
Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously
Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden
3.81 AVERAGE
Good, interesting, specific actionable pieces toward the end. For manager level, or folks familiar with lean/agile thinking, first half is a bit of storytelling fluff: more vignette than teaching fable.
I picked this up because I thought it would be helpful for solidifying the concepts that I’d learned in Ries’s The Lean Startup. Particularly, I was interested in the "Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously" part of the title, i.e. after you’ve talked to a bunch of folks and listened to them complain about their problems (following the guidance in Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test), how do you choose which hypothesis to test before entering (The Lean Startup’s) build-measure-learn experiment loop/framework? For more context, I am a solo founder with 0 employees — and I mention this because the part of the title that I SHOULD have paid attention to is “Successful Organizations.” Most of the book is about culture and management across teams in organizations, which is just completely irrelevant to me at my current stage, and if I’d known that would be the focus, I would have saved myself the time and read something else.
It’s pretty much impossible for any organization to serendipitously find itself in a position of success and having entirely bypassed any kind of 2-way conversation with its customers. So I actually have no idea who the target audience for this book is.
If you’re a large organization, then you already know everything in this book. If you’re not a large organization, then you don’t have all the organizational/bureaucratic cruft impeding you that this book shares anecdotes about getting around. If you’re a manager and everything in this book is new to you, wow .. I guess it’s better to learn this later than never, but I’d love to know how you got your job in the first place. If you’re a solo founder, then you have no organization to manage and a sense-and-respond framework is way too generic to be useful while you’re flailing in the chaos trying to find a product-market fit from scratch. In retrospect, maybe I’d have been better off just reading The Lean Startup again, whose advice felt more tangible and actionable vs. an unending litany of heroic sense-and-respond anecdotes and consultant stuff (McKinsey’s 3 horizons model has little to offer a resource-strapped early-stage startup).
It’s pretty much impossible for any organization to serendipitously find itself in a position of success and having entirely bypassed any kind of 2-way conversation with its customers. So I actually have no idea who the target audience for this book is.
If you’re a large organization, then you already know everything in this book. If you’re not a large organization, then you don’t have all the organizational/bureaucratic cruft impeding you that this book shares anecdotes about getting around. If you’re a manager and everything in this book is new to you, wow .. I guess it’s better to learn this later than never, but I’d love to know how you got your job in the first place. If you’re a solo founder, then you have no organization to manage and a sense-and-respond framework is way too generic to be useful while you’re flailing in the chaos trying to find a product-market fit from scratch. In retrospect, maybe I’d have been better off just reading The Lean Startup again, whose advice felt more tangible and actionable vs. an unending litany of heroic sense-and-respond anecdotes and consultant stuff (McKinsey’s 3 horizons model has little to offer a resource-strapped early-stage startup).
Sense and Respond is a strong high-level summary of business process changes in a world rapidly changing due to technology. Much of this is familiar territory for someone in a product role, but the apt focus on organizational change and management responsibility adds more realism to a genre typically dominated by single-serve tactics (how to user test, how to A/B test, etc) described in a total vacuum. It is rare to find literature that acknowledges the complex systems and cultures that must exist to support continuous development and customer focus. The downside is that the book covers so much ground it remains very broad in its recommendations.
I think this book is a new go to book for framing my field. Sense and respond walk through the essential building blocks of modern successful business.
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
informative
fast-paced
Good encapsulation of modern product principles. We're in the software age, not in the Industrial Age, so the way we build products and services needs to reflect that. Great examples throughout of companies that demonstrate both the success and failures of learning to adopt an iterative, customer-centric approach.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
While it's rooted in Agile and lean principles, what's interesting about Sense & Respond is it tries to provide the reader with techniques for applying those ideas well beyond the team or the individual discipline. This is a "whole company" book, about how you apply a continuous learning, design and deployment model and survive contact with HR, finance, marketing etc. It's very well written - crisp, super condensed and mature. This is a book you can give to the C-suite and expect to find it given a positive reception.
I really wanted to love this book, as I'm a huge advocate for customer discovery to fuel innovation. Sadly, I didn't come away with any great new insights from this book.
It could be great for managers at laggard companies, who haven't completely bought into this whole "social media" thing, but most of the companies I know and work with are well-aware of the importance of customer engagement and small iterative release and learning cycles.
I really respect the authors and did like a few of the examples they shared (the German Netflix-competitor was a great story), but overall the book left me wanting more.
It could be great for managers at laggard companies, who haven't completely bought into this whole "social media" thing, but most of the companies I know and work with are well-aware of the importance of customer engagement and small iterative release and learning cycles.
I really respect the authors and did like a few of the examples they shared (the German Netflix-competitor was a great story), but overall the book left me wanting more.