How Product Managers Use Senseshaping to Drive the Front-end of Digital Product Innovation

Abstract

Overview: Digital product teams innovate in dynamic environments, in which they have incomplete knowledge and function under conditions of broad and diffused team membership and leadership. Generally, a product manager (PM) with no direct authority over the innovation team coordinates diverse cross-functional stakeholders to drive product innovation by initiating appropriate product and feature responses to key internal or external trigger events. This qualitative study of 83 such triggered digital product or feature responses, which the author interpreted through a sensemaking-sensegiving lens, revealed senseshaping—a dynamic, feedback-rich, contextual, and improvisational process the PM uses to build team understanding and commitment to action. The author presents five senseshaping practices PMs can use to help their organizations to recognize, interpret, and respond appropriately to new information, sensemaking cues, or unusual events in the front-end of digital innovation.