Jan Bosch
Jan Bosch As I am involved in several startups, I often get invited to join their Slack channels. For those of you that don’t know the tool, it basically provides real-time group chat functionality combined with record keeping functionality. Several times I have tried to use the tool, but I never managed to make it stick. Reflecting … Read more
As the last post before my Christmas vacation, I thought to reflect with you on 2018. Despite all the apocaholics, the political turmoil in several countries in the Western hemisphere and the stock market tanking like it’s going out of style, I want to remind everyone that we are living in the best time in … Read more
As the year is coming to an end, I’ve been reflecting on my experiences from all the companies that I have worked with during the last 12 months. One reflection that I had was that many companies tend to be stuck in the past and that my role often is to make the people I … Read more
This week we held the reporting workshop for sprint 15 of Software Center. The event was, with 150+ participants, the largest and most successful workshop we have had so far and it was great to have it at the fabulous HQ facilities of AB Volvo. Although we had quite a broad set of topics and … Read more
Recently, when interviewing (for our research) someone at a company in the food space, I learned something that I hadn’t realized: these days, cheese is a by-product. For thousands of years, farmers milked cows and then, as a way to preserve the milk, they made cheese out of it. And that cheese, or at least … Read more
This week I gave a talk at a meetup on business agility. The, admittedly controversial, title of my talk was “Why Digitalization Will Kill Your Company Too”, a topic that I discussed in a previous blog post. The interesting thing during the meetup was that lots of participants asked me why companies are not changing … Read more
The last days, I had some time to reflect and one of the things that consistently surfaces is the amount of irritation and frustration that many people experience in their jobs. Now, to be clear, the people that I work with and that I meet are no complainypants at all, but generally serious, hard-working people … Read more
Over the last month or so, I have been reading a book titled “Skin in the game” by Taleb. He doesn’t like academics very much and scientists get roasted quite severely in several chapters. Being a professor myself, that stings a little but the problem is that I agree with him. His main point, severely … Read more
During the last weeks, I reflected on the difference between the startups and the large, established companies that I work with. One of the main differences seems to be the amount of freedom that individuals have. When a company is first formed and the initial team is assembled, there is of course the normal “storming, … Read more
Although most of the online (SaaS) companies that I work with are heavily data-driven, the embedded systems companies have had more difficulty to achieve that. With connectivity becoming more and more the norm for embedded systems, though, these companies are now also starting to become data driven. This is great as replacing opinion-driven decision making … Read more
