Your Ecosystem Has 50 Shades Of Gray

Another week on the road and another set of discussions around business and software ecosystems. Although it is clear that the ability of a company to build an ecosystem around its business is replacing company size as a, or perhaps the, key differentiator, I notice that there is a lot of confusion about what being … Read more

Don’t Get Stuck In Your Company’s Echo Chamber

The last weeks, I have attended several conferences and events and I have noticed a remarkable difference between public and company internal conferences. The internal conferences have a tendency to have a set of themes that everyone talks about in the same way. Whether it’s ecosystems, blockchain, artificial intelligence or any other popular topic, everyone … Read more

Stop Wasting Resources And Do Platforms Already!

This week we hosted the 22nd International System and Software Product Line Conference in Gothenburg and I had the honor of being the general chair for the conference. Software product line research is concerned with the challenges associated with building a family of products from a shared platform. These challenges include managing variants, balancing platform … Read more

Stop Thinking It’s Not Your Problem

(image credit: pixabay) Engineers form the core of a product company. Although I have the greatest respect for sales people and know how hard a job that can be, it’s the engineers that design and develop the product that, in the end, is needed to have anything to sell. Building a product that sells of … Read more

Engineering Deep Learning Systems is Hard!

(Image credit: pixabay) This week I spent in the lovely city of Prague, attending the SEAA 2018 conference. The main reason for attending was that I had the opportunity to present a paper that I co-authored with colleagues from Peltarion about the software engineering challenges of deep learning. Peltarion offers an amazing platform for building … Read more

Five Reasons Why You Are Not Data-Driven

  (Photo by Arif Wahid on Unsplash) This week I spent a lot of time with companies talking about data and using data for a variety of purposes, ranging from improved decision making to machine learning and deep learning systems. All companies I talk to have tons of data in their archives and often generate … Read more

Projects Suck; Do Products Instead!

Image credit: pixabay With the vacation in the Nordics largely over, I have had the opportunity again to spend time with several companies over the last week. I noticed a pattern that I had seen before but didn’t really reflect upon: whenever a company that I work with is experiencing difficulty in changing to where … Read more

Does Agile Kill Innovation?

Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash During a recent conversation with a journalist, the downsides of agile came up in the interview. The questions were centered around stress levels of team members, the frustration with not being able to do a proper design before building features, the perceived reduction in innovation and other factors. During … Read more

Towards Dataism

Over the last months, one of the books that I’ve been reading is Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s a really worthwhile read and I can warmly recommend it. One of the key ideas that he brings up in the last part of the book is the evolution of religions that mankind seems to … Read more