Question

Your company is now 20 years old, and you are solidly in the maturity phase of your life cycle. You want to move away from the standard forms of organizational structure (functional, divisional, matrix) and create an organizational structure that will give you better insights into your customer’s needs and help you react more flexibly to their wishes.

Which of the following actions would best help to accomplish your goals?
A. Assign a set of your best salespeople to reach out to customers and determine what products of yours they have liked best. Create groups of specialized employees to design and create new products that incorporate the best points of customer favorite products.
B. Put employees from different departments into cross-functional teams and have each team identify a customer problem and work together to create a solution for it.

Answer 1

To achieve better insights into customer needs and react more flexibly, you can either assign top salespeople to gather feedback and design new products based on customer preferences or create cross-functional teams to identify and solve customer problems.

Step-by-step explanation:

A. Assign a set of your best salespeople to reach out to customers and determine what products of yours they have liked best. Create groups of specialized employees to design and create new products that incorporate the best points of customer favorite products.

B. Put employees from different departments into cross-functional teams and have each team identify a customer problem and work together to create a solution for it.

To accomplish your goals of gaining better insights into your customer's needs and being more flexible in meeting their wishes, both options A and B are viable strategies. Option A focuses on gathering feedback directly from customers by assigning top salespeople to interact with them and design new products that incorporate the best points of their favorite products. Option B on the other hand, promotes collaboration and problem-solving by forming cross-functional teams to identify customer problems and work together to create solutions. Both approaches would facilitate a stronger understanding of your customer's needs and enable your organization to respond flexibly to those needs.

Answer 2

To create a more flexible and customer-focused organizational structure, forming cross-functional teams that work together to solve customer problems is a recommended action. This encourages collaboration and taps into a diverse range of skills and expertise, leading to more innovative outcomes and an agile business model.

Step-by-step explanation:

When a company reaches the maturity phase and aims to focus on customer needs and flexibility, transforming its organizational structure can be essential. Shifting away from traditional structures like functional, divisional, or matrix, a company could benefit from creating teams oriented around customer problems or needs. Specifically:

• Cross-functional teams are ideal to tackle tasks since they combine diverse skills, experiences, and expertise.
• These teams can be tasked with identifying a customer problem and collaboratively working towards a solution, which can lead to innovative products and services.
• An organizational chart can help clarify roles within this new structure, making it more transparent who is collaborating on what task.

Such an approach leads to a more agile and responsive business, ready to adapt to rapid changes in the marketplace and better positioned to understand and act on customer feedback.