Jan Bosch
Two-sided markets are among the most powerful business models in the digital economy. Instead of selling a product to a single customer group, you build a platform that connects two distinct communities that benefit from interacting with each other. The platform becomes valuable precisely because it attracts both sides simultaneously. Each new participant increases the … Read more
Over the last decade, companies have increasingly discovered that the most valuable assets they possess aren’t necessarily their products, their brands or even their intellectual property. It’s their data. Data about customers, markets, operations and competitors has become the raw material from which modern companies derive insights, predictions and, ultimately, competitive advantage. However, collecting and … Read more
One of the most powerful effects of technology isn’t that it makes things faster or cheaper; it’s that it fundamentally changes who gets access. For decades, access to expertise has been constrained by geography, cost and availability of professionals. If you needed medical advice, psychological support or even something as seemingly simple as a vision … Read more
For decades, regulatory compliance has been treated as a necessary tax on doing business. It’s something organizations endure rather than leverage: teams manually interpret regulations, create controls, document evidence and prepare for audits. The audits often happen months after the actual work was conducted. The result is high cost, slow feedback and a compliance function … Read more
For many years, organizations have talked about cross-functional teams as a desirable end state. The idea is appealing: Bring together people with different skills, remove handovers and let teams move faster. In practice, companies struggle with creating effective cross-functional teams. The teams may be created and have the right form but fail to embrace the … Read more
Over the past decades, software-intensive systems companies have gone through several major paradigm shifts. We moved from hardware-centric products to software-defined systems, from waterfall to Agile, from projects to products and now superset platforms, and from episodic releases to continuous deployment. When each of these shifts became relevant, it was initially resisted and, intentionally or … Read more
One of the most persistent misconceptions I encounter when discussing data and AI is the idea that they’re primarily about better predictions, smarter dashboards or more advanced analytics. While all of these have value, they miss the deeper point. The real strategic power of data and AI lies in their ability to enable continuous learning … Read more
One useful way to understand how companies develop and evolve their offerings is to look at what they fundamentally organize around. In my experience, most organizations fall into one of three broad categories: project-centric, product-centric or platform-centric. Project-centric companies organize everything as a project. Whether they’re developing a product, adapting it for a specific customer … Read more
The history of industry is littered with failed projects. Projects where a team was asked to build a product based on a specification, a budget and a timeline. And failed. According to the research I’ve conducted, 60-80 percent of all IT projects are considered failures in some sense, either because they failed completely or failed … Read more
Although there’s quite a bit of criticism of the new, young generations of millennials and Gen Zers, one aspect that I genuinely appreciate is their focus on purpose and meaning. As a Gen Xer, I grew up professionally in a time dominated by capitalism, globalization, efficiency and scale. Success was measured primarily in growth curves, … Read more
