I just read this nice piece about ChatGPT by Jan Scholtes. Very insightful piece with a couple of eye openers for me on how ChatGPT works. One of the myths that Scholtes debunked for me is that ChatGPT thinks or knows anything. Artificial Intelligence sounds like thinking and knowing. But…

The journey of a product owner with a product or service, is about gradually peeling the union of IT and organizational change. The product vision will uncover the areas in which the organization needs to change and set the requirements for the change. — Product ownership revolves around two questions: “Where do we need to go?” and “What does it take to get there?”. Oftentimes the answer to the second question takes some form of digital transformation in the organization. And what needs to change in the organization and IT depends on where the…

The current state of design thinking might seem gloomy. There is a lot of criticism and lots of things have gone wrong. But there are so many good things in design thinking that I believe the future of design thinking is bright and it will become more mainstream as more organizations adopt new technologies and practices. One of the things that design thinking needs to get through this slump is ownership.

There are a number of ways that anthroposophy can be integrated into business. One way is to use it as a way to rethink the way we work. Anthroposophy can help businesses to see work as a process of connection and collaboration. This can help to reduce the amount of stress that is often associated with work and create a healthy social order. Additionally, businesses can use anthroposophy as a way to improve business efficiency. By understanding how humans interact with their environment and each other, businesses can learn to better navigate complexity.

The difference between a product owner and a product manager is that a product owner is responsible for the overall product vision, strategy, and execution while a product manager is responsible for the day-to-day operations of a product. — One thing I find weird in a lot of discussions in the Agile development world is the hyper-focus on definitions of roles and the adherence to the rulebooks about all the ceremonies. I am all for having roles and responsibilities clear but I am amazed by all the discussions about…

Visual prototypes can be hugely valuable for product owners in a agile team. Not only can they help to communicate the design concepts that are being discussed in the team, but they can also help to test out the viability of potential user interfaces and design patterns. By creating visual prototypes in an agile team, the product owner can ensure that their ideas are communicated effectively and that their designs are tested before they are implemented in the software development cycle.

A product owner is responsible for the entire product and its outlook, whereas a product designer is responsible for the look and feel of a product. I am on a journey from product designer to product owner. It’s an interesting journey with interesting challenges. One of the things I have discovered is that designers and product owners work from the same mental model of value creation if you look at design from the big definition of design. So the skills and experience of a product designer seem to be a good foundation for the role of product owner.

Sometimes a book comes to you at exactly the right time. Yesterday I found a book on my desk that was a book like that. The book is called Corporate Rebels and is written by Joost Minnaar and Pim de Morree. I read it cover to cover in one evening…

We are in the midst of a leadership crisis. The rational, ego-driven authority model of organizations that is based on ideas that are over a century old will not work anymore in the future. We can dive deep into this like I did in previous essays about a non-hierarchical leadership…