Over the last few years, I’ve enjoyed a steadily growing following on Linkedin. I’m very grateful for that, so thank you if you’re one of them. …

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…

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. …

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. …

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…

In most of the companies I work with, the decision to develop a new product is made based on an assessment of the likely revenue and margin the product will create. This assumes a clear specification of the intended functionality of the product as a basis for the cost estimation…

Apologies for the late posting of this article. However, I am happy to share that I just returned from successfully climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. 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…

In the previous post, we focused on the role of platforms to accomplish a constant evolution of the products we manufacture. …

Few things are more satisfying than putting your hands on a new product that you plan to use for the foreseeable future. …