Jan Bosch

One of the topics many people fail to understand is the intimate relationship between business strategy and system and software architecture. This is the case for folks on the business side as well as many engineers. To illustrate this, one company I work with is involved in standardization in the context of home automation. It … Read more

In Swedish, there’s a saying that claims that there’s a fundamental difference between giving up and moving on. Giving up is to simply stop the fight even if it’s still worthwhile to continue to pursue a difficult goal. Moving on is concerned with realizing that the goal you’re pursuing is no longer relevant. The world … Read more

One of the hardest things for us as human beings is to adequately balance focus on our own goals and drivers and the needs, requests and influences of others. We all know people who sail their own course no matter what others ask of them and we know people who are so responsive to others … Read more

One of my main pet peeves with Agile is that it, at heart, is a reactive paradigm. The mindset is that we’re in a “steady as she goes” state, there’s some event external to us and we react to it in an agile fashion. In many companies where the business side and the engineering side … Read more

The first blog post in this series discussed the challenges that people are experiencing when working with the agile paradigm. In general, there are three main areas that Agile considers out of scope and that, in my view, need to be included in the succeeding paradigm. These areas are product management, systems engineering and scaling, … Read more

In recent months, I’ve started a series of online and in-person workshops around Agile. These workshops have focused on the challenges of Agile, the things in Agile we want to keep, the things we want to remove as well as practices that we seek to add. Here, I intend to discuss the key elements of … Read more

We started this series with an exploration of the importance of extending our focus from only how to build the systems we’re responsible for to the why and what of these systems. When we only look at the how, we tend to focus on efficiency: cranking out as many features as possible per unit of … Read more

Few topics are discussed more often in companies than the organization. How to organize people into teams? How to organize functions into departments? Where to allocate responsibilities? The problems of the existing organization. How much better things would be if we did it differently? And so on. This is particularly the case with product management … Read more