Jan Bosch
As I work with teams in dozens of companies, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern over the years. When I start to work with the team and we go through introductions and the preliminaries, everything looks peachy and wonderful. As we get into the work at hand and I (innocently) start to ask questions, a certain … Read more
With the constantly increasing connectivity and data collection in everything from websites to the Internet of Things, collecting accurate measurements about user and system behavior in the field is becoming increasingly feasible and easy. This is causing a shift in the way we develop and evolve systems, away from requirements and instead focusing on the … Read more
One of the human traits that I tend to forget about (and I believe many with me) is that we ignore well over 99 percent of all the information that our senses receive. If you don’t believe me, take the selective attention test as a case in point. In many ways, focusing our mental energy … Read more
A friend of mine got fired last week. I will not share any details to protect the innocent, but he had been with the same company for close to 20 years when the company, that has been struggling for years, decided that he wasn’t a good fit anymore. The pattern is a typical one that … Read more
Especially in the embedded systems industry, the approach has traditionally been to build products that get worse over time. We design, manufacture and sell a product to the customer, it slowly deteriorates and then we sell the customer a new product several years later (see figure 1). Even though the next product will be better … Read more
Although everyone talks about digitalization (software, data and AI) and the risk of disruption that this brings to companies, very few talk about how companies get disrupted in practice. Most treat it as an amorphous force that topples companies over like a force of nature that is unavoidable and where we are the victims. Of … Read more
Data-driven decision making frequently requires experimentation as a mechanism to acquire the necessary data. When working with companies in transitioning from opinion-based to data-driven decision making, however, I frequently run into push back. The typical comment is that we already know the answers to the specific questions at hand and since we already know this … Read more
The companies that I work with, both in my research and my consulting engagements, are all going through a digital transformation. These companies are looking to become digital companies rather than whatever they were before. In this journey, however, there is an interesting question that comes up on a regular basis: what does it mean … Read more
During the last week I was reflecting on the change processes ongoing in several of the companies that I work with. Although I don’t want to generalize too aggressively, it seems to me that most companies are on a similar journey. Starting from a situation where the key value proposition of the company was expressed … Read more
During a number of discussions the last weeks, the notion of outcomes and disappointment with outcomes was brought up. The tendency in these conversations is an endless exploration of the reasons the unsatisfactory outcome happened (or, occasionally, why the unexpectedly positive outcome happened). Quickly people start to disagree and provide arguments for alternative points of … Read more
