Complete Web Monitoring

Business Agility: Iterative Improvements

Companies that don’t understand their markets are doomed to failure. You may have the best product in the world, but if you’re selling it to the wrong audience—or if they don’t actually need it—you’ll lose. Communities keep you nimble by showing you what they need and providing immediate feedback on what’s working and what’s wrong.

A Climate of Faster Change

When business cycles were slower and customers lacked the means to engage companies directly, firms had slow product release cycles. They could take months or even years to design new products, build them, release them into the market, and see how they fared. If the companies were clever, they built instrumentation into their products and reviewed the resulting data when the time came to build new ones. But it was still a slow process, shown in Figure 12-19.

Figure 12-19. Traditional design/feedback cycle

This cycle existed whether the company was releasing a car, a phone service, or a new ad campaign. To know if things had improved, the company looked at the results. This approach also assumed that the problem the product solved was well understood and that the solution to that problem was clear—it just needed to be built.

A long product cycle and periodic review of feedback is simply too slow for competitive, fast-changing business climates, particularly if your company is web-based or offers ...