{"id":1191,"date":"2021-01-20T14:58:23","date_gmt":"2021-01-20T14:58:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/?p=1191"},"modified":"2021-01-20T14:58:25","modified_gmt":"2021-01-20T14:58:25","slug":"continuous-dialog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/2021\/01\/20\/continuous-dialog\/","title":{"rendered":"Continuous dialog"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

During the Christmas break, I read several books including \u201cSense & respond\u201d by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. The authors frame the difference between traditional and digital companies in terms of the absence or presence, respectively, of a continuous dialog with the market and the customers. Of course, traditional companies interact with the market and talk to customers, but once a product specification has been defined, the product developed and the product is ready for sales, the discussion is mostly concerned with getting customers to actually buy the darn thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the sales are disappointing or if there are many requests for \nchanges, there often is an upgrade or next version of the product. \nHowever, the frequency of updates tends to be low and is often measured \nin years. In automotive, a car model usually lives for 5-7 years and has\n a mid-life upgrade after 3 years. Even traditional software products \nexperience a yearly release cycle at most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital companies, on the other hand, are in a constant dialog or \nconversation with the market. Through a variety of different metrics and\n mechanisms, they continuously learn from the feedback from customers, \nmake changes and measure their effectiveness. These mechanisms include \ninstrumenting the product to understand how the product is used, the \nability to provide different feature versions and ways to assign users \nto different groups. And, of course, digital companies assume continuous\n deployment (DevOps) to be in place as the feedback cycle should be as \nshort as possible and preferably be measured in days and weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another main difference between traditional and digital companies is \nthat the former tend to focus on what customers say while the latter \nfocus on what customers actually do. This is a very important \ndistinction as, although we all view ourselves as rational people, it \nturns out that in almost all cases, there\u2019s a significant gap between \nwhat people say and what they do. Deciding based on what people say can \ntherefore really throw you off the optimal path as the things you build \nor add to your product may not deliver any actual value. advertorial \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Going from focusing on what people say to what people do can be a \ndifficult transition, especially in B2B contexts. Customers may walk as \nthey feel you\u2019re not listening to them. Also, it\u2019s really hard to tell \nthem that they may believe something about their behavior that\u2019s \nactually incorrect. However, the alternative is to build functionality \nthat won\u2019t add any business value in the long term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Especially for embedded-systems companies, there often is a belief \nthat these principles only apply to software, but not to electronics and\n mechanics. The interesting development is that more and more companies \nare now starting to explore mechanisms to deploy new electronics and, \nperhaps, even mechanical components to products in the field. Of course,\n the release frequency is lower for anything that includes atoms, but \nit\u2019s entirely possible to also have a dialog with the market for these \ntypes of components. It\u2019s mostly a matter of finding the right business \nmodel to support it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many in R&D don\u2019t realize the economics of R&D budgets. For a\n company that allocates 5 percent of its revenue to research and \ndevelopment, it means that every euro invested has to generate 20 euros \nof business value. It\u2019s not enough that the R&D costs are covered. \nThe best way to ensure that R&D activities deliver the 20x return is\n to take small steps, measure continuously whether you deliver on the \nexpectations and change immediately if the response from the market is \ndifferent than expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital companies are in a continuous dialog with the market, have short feedback cycles and focus on customer behavior (rather than on what customers say). As digitalization continues to be the theme for 2021 as well, evaluate your business and technology strategy to ensure that you\u2019re incorporating these principles and transitioning towards these. The only constant is change and not changing has a very predictable outcome: extinction. And who wants that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To get more insights earlier, sign up for my newsletter at <\/em>jan@janbosch.com<\/em><\/a> or follow me on<\/em> janbosch.com\/blog<\/em><\/a>, LinkedIn (<\/em>linkedin.com\/in\/janbosch<\/em><\/a>), Medium<\/a> or Twitter (<\/em>@JanBosch<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the Christmas break, I read several books including \u201cSense & respond\u201d by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. The authors frame the difference between traditional and digital companies in terms of the absence or presence, respectively, of a continuous dialog with the market and the customers. Of course, traditional companies interact with the market and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1193,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191\/revisions\/1193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}