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

The End of Assembly Line Management

We’re in the midst of a revolution. Quantum leaps in technology are enabling organizations to observe and measure people’s behavior in real time, communicate internally at extraordinary speed, and innovate continuously. These new, software-driven technologies are transforming the way companies interact with their customers, employees, and other stakeholders.

This is no mere tech issue. The transformation requires a complete rethinking of the way we organize and manage work. And, as software becomes ever more integrated into every product and service, making this big shift is quickly becoming the key operational challenge for businesses of all kinds. We need a management model that doesn’t merely account for, but actually embraces, continuous change. Yet the truth is, most organizations continue to rely on outmoded, industrial-era operational models. They structure their teams, manage their people, and evolve their organizational cultures the way they always have.

Now, organizations are emerging, and thriving, based on their capacity to sense and respond instantly to customer and employee behaviors. In Sense and Respond, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, leading tech experts and founders of the global Lean UX movement, vividly show how these companies operate, highlighting the new mindset and skills needed to lead and manage them—and to continuously innovate within them.

In illuminating and instructive business examples, you’ll see organizations with distinctively new operating principles: shifting from managing outputs to what the authors call “outcome-focused management”; forming self-guided teams that can read and react to a fast-changing environment; creating a learning-all-the-time culture that can understand and respond to new customer behaviors and the data they generate; and finally, developing in everyone at the company the new universal skills of customer listening, assessment, and response.

This engaging and practical book provides the crucial new operational and management model to help you and your organization win in a world of continuous change.

Jeff Gothelf is a lean-thinking and design evangelist, spreading the gospel of great team collaboration, product innovation, and evidence-based decision making. He is an author, speaker, and thought leader on the future of product development and design, often teaching workshops or giving talks on building cultures that support teamwork and innovation. Earlier in his career, Jeff led the UX design teams at TheLadders and Web Trends. He also worked with and led small teams of software designers at AOL. Find Jeff Gothelf at: jeffgothelf.com/blog/#sthash.u778LREd.dpbs, jeffgothelf.com/blog/about/#sthash.QeHExuty.dpbs, and linkedin.com/in/gothelf, and follow on Twitter @jboogie.

Josh Seiden is a designer, consultant, and coach who helps companies create new digital products and services. In his 25-year career he’s worked with start-ups, large organizations, and enterprises of all sizes, whether in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. He is a founder and past President of the Interaction Design Association. Find Josh at: joshuaseiden.com, joshuaseiden.com/blog/portfolio/, and linkedin.com/in/jseiden, and follow on Twitter @jseiden.