Jan Bosch
One of my favorite activities when meeting with the companies I work with is to tell them that their customer doesn’t give a flying hoot about their product. This often leads to a storm of protests and objections and meeting participants proudly showing me net promoter scores and quotes from customers where they express their … Read more
Humans love to think in terms of absolutes. We like to set a target, work really hard toward it and have the illusion that when we reach it all our troubles will be gone and we’ll be in a state of permanent bliss. For instance, sports competitions have a very clear target and those of … Read more
Traditional companies building products including mechanics, electronics and software tend to focus on the bill of materials (BOM), standard unit cost (SUC) or some other KPI tracking the per-product instance cost during manufacturing. When manufacturing large numbers of the same product for extended periods, this makes perfect sense as every penny saved is multiplied over … Read more
One of the human behaviors that never ceases to amaze me is the gap between what people say they do and what they actually do. In management research, this is often referred to as espoused theory versus theory in use. When it comes to digitalization and working with data, I see a similar pattern in … Read more
One of the popular metaphors for software development that annoys me to no end is the notion of a software factory. Even if the underlying concept is concerned with well-defined processes and structured ways of working, the image it draws up in my mind is that of a production line. And it pictures software engineers … Read more
Few words in industry have such an overloaded meaning as the term “innovation.” Innovation and all its derivatives, like being innovative, in many contexts simply mean “good.” The underlying idea is that we like new and different, and an innovation will provide that. In product development, innovation almost always refers to introducing a new technology … Read more
In the previous post, we focused on the role of platforms to accomplish a constant evolution of the products we manufacture. As such, we accept that the traditional premise of manufacturing – producing as many copies of the same item as possible for as long as possible – is no longer a viable way forward. … Read more
The baseball player, Yogi Berra, famously said “Prediction is hard. Especially about the future.” That is of course entirely correct. Who of us predicted the COVID pandemic or the way the stock market tanked in 2022? Of course, there are always doomsayers who continuously predict these things, but they are right in the way a … Read more
As 2022 is moving towards its end and this post is supposed to come out on Christmas day, I felt it might be worthwhile to share some of my reflections on 2022. In many ways, it has been a bit of a strange year in my view in that we on the one hand moved … Read more
Few things are more satisfying than putting your hands on a new product that you plan to use for the foreseeable future. Whether it’s your new mobile phone, a computer, a smart TV or a car, the fact is that we’re physical beings in a physical world and we like physical things. Rationally, we may … Read more
