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If you’re leading software-intensive product development without a software background, you’ve likely experienced the frustration of teams missing commitments despite clear expectations. You’ve defended delayed projects to executives, scrambled to reallocate resources, or watched initiatives stall for opaque technical reasons. Maybe you’ve sat through status meetings where “technical debt” gets blamed for everything, or listened to architects explain why a “simple” feature request will take six months or longer. There is something you might be missing. Once you understand it,…

In high tech systems software development, there can be a significant gap between the expectations of leadership to “deliver”, and the software organization ability to meet these expectations. In response to sometimes unrealistic deadlines, software teams feel forced to offer ‘shortcut’ solutions. These shortcuts are either expensive to maintain or can lead to growing the organization at an unhealthy pace. Often the dialogues around what is necessary and what is realistic are emotional. Engineers discuss ‘technical debt’ with leadership, without…

As we near the end of 2020, many CEO’s, CFO’s and business owners again will have experienced the impact of not delivering the planned innovations on time. In many companies, the software team is (perceived to be) the main bottleneck. Sometimes, leadership identifies “the team” as the problem. Maybe they don’t have the right skills or are not engaged enough. Another time, the problem is diagnosed as “the process”. A whole new industry category arose around helping businesses gain agility…

My first experiences with Agile/Scrum development date from 2006. The agile manifesto resonated immediately and it was easy to get the software community ‘sold’. The agile / scrum practices such as working in fixed length iterations, frequent demo’s and feedback, fixed budget – variable scope fit very well with the way software engineers think and work. It was at first surprising (but naïve) to learn that my colleagues in the other functional areas did not immediately see the benefits. Marketing…

Imagine you just started your own gardening company. Your first customer, Mary, was very happy with your dedication, personal attention and praised the quality of your work. “Never have been happier with a gardener she said, great results for a reasonable price”. Soon the word gets out. A second happy customer. And a third. The gardening business is booming and you are a successful player. New customers pop up like mushrooms. You nourish each new customer. Personal attention and a…

“Software is eating the world”. In his famous article written in 2011 Mark Andreessen wrote that “we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy”. He expected many more industries to be disrupted by software and was proven right. With recent breakthroughs in AI, we have not seen the end of all disruptions. Mark Andreessen argued in favor of investing more…

During the developing of systems and software, a lot of problems have to be solved. The challenges can be technical in nature, but often the hardest problems arise between people. It not always clear, if people have similar goals and targets. And if people optimize for different goals, sometimes what seems a personal disagreement, is really a business alignment problem.‘Lean’ has a very simple view of problems. In fact, there are only three types of problems: There is no standard…