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A review by samkrunch
Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously by Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden
1.0
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).