Reviews

Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously by Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden

kettlepot's review against another edition

4.0

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.

laupremor's review against another edition

informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

sifter's review

4.0

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.

afhill's review

3.0

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.

stonecrops's review

3.0

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.