This is where I share my random thoughts on organisation, technology and mindset related to digital transformation. Might be a bit random at start, but maybe it will eventually turn into something cohesive.
“Intention without action is just a lie.” - Albert Bertilsson 2025 This is a shorter and more cynical variation of the original full quote Joel A. Barker: "Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world."
A common planning strategy is to determine pace by looking at the total amount of work required and divide it by the amount of time available. This has some merit for work that is an aggregate of identical and independent small tasks. If you need to walk four kilometers in one hour it’s a pretty good strategy to make sure that in the first quarter you have walked one kilometer, and to sustain that…
Salami tactics is a popular term for slicing up a problem into multiple small pieces in order to eventually reach a larger goal. I was both using this and subjected to it before even knowing about it. It was brought to my attention years ago, when I discussed a project with an architect who smilingly exclaimed “Ah, salami tactics!” The term is more frequently used as a strategy in business or…
From a few recent discussions and events I find that role playing is a wonderful tool to improve team dynamics and performance. In this post I’ll quickly summarize my thoughts on the topic. In its simplest form role playing at work can be to consciously decide to take on a different role than what you are naturally having. By role I don’t necessarily mean a formal role in the company, more…
To some extent I make a living from figuring out where and how to make use of technology, specifically computers. Here are my thoughts on where we are going in the near future with AI. If you thought that computers are everywhere you haven’t seen anything yet, the major movement that has already started and will accelerate is the application of AI in new fields. There is much work today that can…
“Training large language models on internet content is like feeding children sewage water. The fact that there is a lot of it, includes a lot of variation and is cheap doesn't mean that it is good.” - Albert Bertilsson 2023
Some thoughts on listening... When listening to a group to make a decision there is value in figuring out what type of decision is being made. Is the purpose to decide on a matter mainly driving opinions (eg: Where to have the next kick-off) or how to best solve a technical problem? There will be a small group of people that share their beliefs and are wrong, and there will be a small group (often…
Disclaimer The following piece does not argue that some title, method or skill is better or worse than something else, it is merely my observation and reflection on how the title is used, and how the work is similar to traditional engineering. Why is this important While large parts of the population is not directly involved in the software industry there is a growing dependency on the products…
Much has been written in how to make choices and how to evaluate options, much less on where those options come from. In this short text I’ll try to share some thoughts on how to work with options. Why do you need options Even if everything seems to be working great, if you lack options or fall for the temptation not to invest in creating options you become vulnerable to external events and lose…
I've worked for long enough and read enough book on methods for decision making to try to make some generic yet hopefully valuable conclusions from them. Many books on the topic are far to wordy in my humble opinion with respect to the amount of novelty they provide, hence this attempt to offer a more condensed article on the subject with links to further reading on truly worthwhile frameworks.…
There is a very specific type of project that I’ve observed and occasionally participated in that I haven’t seen described or documented frequently. For lack of a better name I’ll call it the “Swedish leap”, as it to some extent is connected to the Swedish summer vacation culture although it wouldn’t necessarily need to be as most of the enablers could be recreated in any company without having a…
Something I have observed in many places over many years is that asymmetries between stakeholders are very common. The most obvious example for a product owner is when you have a senior manager as stakeholder contacting you while at the same time you can have millions of daily users that rarely contact you. It's an easy and understandable mistake to prioritize the work from the senior manager that…
Some thoughts inspired from reading Daniel Kahneman’s thinking fast and slow, I highly recommend reading it. All organisations that I can remember working for have had a bias towards short term decisions. I some times hear this being blamed on the need to keep the stock market happy, but I have seen the same in both state run organisations as well as in privately own companies of different sizes.…
Edge computing is defined by Wikipedia as: "A distributed computing paradigm that brings computation and data storage closer to the location where it is needed, to improve response times and save bandwidth.". A summary of the first few lines can be condensed to: "The origins of edge computing lie in content delivery networks that were created in the late 1990s to serve web and video content from…
Sometimes I see how teams and even entire organisations hiding uncomfortable findings and actively side stepping real issues to avoid learning and improvement. I think there can be numerous reasons for this but from an internal perspective it can of course be psychologically easy to try to point to something external, a different team or even better a method, system or tool since they will not…
You may chose any other word to describe it, challenge, job, opportunity, issue, depending on who is presenting (recruiter, manager, stakeholder) it to you and under which circumstance (interview, task force meeting, strategy workshop) the fundamental traits of the problem is that something has to be done. The "something" might be a complex monster of a problem to something that you might consider…
Talk to an engineer or architect and they will likely be aware of the term "single point of failure" and have experience in trying to remove them or mitigate the effects of them. Ask them to give a few examples of such issues and they will frequently be able to come up with several examples, a database in some system, a router in another or a configuration service in some obscure hidden corner of…
When building a team the first few choices are critical for the problem you are about to solve and how to solve it. The first few persons brought in on the will be important to grow a team culture and even more importantly they will be the critical competence that will define the solution going forward. Building the team is the same as building the solution, people will create things they are…
In a recent discussion about data informed product development I was asked about how we value professional experience. The thought had a very interesting angle in the fact that there are still a lot of things we have individual observations of and hold true even though they might lack data or scientific proof. I realized that I had already had a similar discussion earlier that day and that the…
Recently I've been discussing strategy with a couple of colleagues, and as stimulating as it is to discuss things with smart people as frustrating it can become later on when trying to make sense of the discussions and figuring out what is the right direction going forward... One of the topics that stuck with me was a few discussions revolving around "catching up". What does it mean to catch up in…
With the knowledge of humanity expanding at an ever increasing pace it is safe to assume that you know only a fraction of what is possible to know, even within a very specific field. With ever increasing access to information and knowledge created and shared by others there are two key aspects I think are worth while to remember in a world where there is an abundance of knowledge. Recognize what…
As a product owner even with the most success in creating autonomy and a good environment to work with your closest peers it is highly likely that you will at some point in time be dependent on others in ways that are not beneficial. A common generalization for this is called the problem of "tragedy of the commons" which is simply when individuals act in a way that is optimal for them in the short…
An extremely frequently used word in business is "strategy". And as frequently that word is used just as rare is it to hear someone discuss meta strategy, to the point that I'd like to define the term itself. A meta strategy can be thought of as a strategy for choosing strategy, or in other words thinking about strategies in general rather than a specific strategy itself. Why is reasoning about…
One of the most frequently skipped or skimped areas of product development is the creation of a product platform. Understandably pouring effort into a platform is not easily prioritized, this is not what you want, it's what you need to get what you want. Typically technical architects can easily see the value of creating a solid platform, as a product owner you'll find your engineers to be your…
A reoccurring fallacy I've seen on numerous occasions is the application of conventional wisdom to a problem, it's important to avoid a product team to rely heavily on it as it obstructs innovation and decrease the application of a scientific process and rational thinking. The temptation is of course the use of something that you know, something that is true and something that you like, and the…