Speaker announcement: Jan Bosch

About Jan

Jan Bosch is a professor at Chalmers University Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, and director of the Software Center, a strategic partner-funded collaboration between more than 15 large European companies (including Ericsson, Volvo Cars, Volvo Trucks, Saab Defense, Scania, Siemens, and Bosch) and five universities focused on digitalization. Earlier, he worked as Vice President of Engineering Process at Intuit Inc. where he also led Intuit's Open Innovation efforts and headed the central mobile technologies team. Before that, he was vice president and head of the Software and Application Technologies Laboratory at Nokia Research Center, Finland. Prior to that, he headed the software engineering research group at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He received an MSc degree from the University of Twente, The Netherlands, and a PhD degree from Lund University, Sweden.

His research activities include digitalization, evidence-based development, business ecosystems, artificial intelligence and machine/deep learning, software architecture, software product families, and software variability management. He is the author of several books including "Design and Use of Software Architectures: Adopting and Evolving a Product Line Approach" and “Speed, Data and Ecosystems: Excelling in a Software-Driven World”, editor of several books and volumes, and author of hundreds of research articles. He is an editor for the Journal of Systems and Software as well as Science of Computer Programming, chaired several conferences as general and program chair, served on numerous program committees, and organized countless workshops. Jan is a fellow member of the International Software Product Management Association (ISPMA) and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science.

Jan serves on the boards of Burt Intelligence, Shelfplanner, and Strawberry Planet. Earlier he served on the boards of IVER and Peltarion and was chairman of the boards of Auqtus, Fidesm, and Remente. In the startup space, Jan is an angel investor in several startup companies. He also runs a boutique consulting firm, Boschonian AB, that offers its clients support around the implications of digitalization including the management of R&D and innovation.

Get to know Jan even more at janbosch.com or on his LinkedIn page.

The talk: Stop wasting your R&D budget! Start modeling value and experiment!

Research by us and others shows that somewhere between half and two-thirds of all features in a typical system are never used or used so seldomly that these should not have been built in the first place. In addition, 70-90% of all resources in R&D work on commodity functionality, rather than differentiation and innovation. 

The current practices around product management and R&D are incredibly wasteful. In this talk, I present an alternative approach organized around quantitative modeling of value, experimental development approaches such as A/B testing, and continuous monitoring of value delivered to customers in operational software.

Why I look forward to this talk

To my great pleasure, my colleague Cecilia Justad invited our next speaker, Jan Bosch. What a brilliant move! It also made me take a walk down memory lane.

Something like thirty years ago, I had the office next to Jan at BTH. From then on I have followed his career with great interest. And what a career! From professor at BTH, to Intuit, and now professor at Chalmers and director of the Software Center. Plus loads more in between!

I found one of Jan’s early books, “Design and Use of Software Architectures: Adopting and Evolving a Product-Line Approach“, very inspiring! Since then, he has of course published many other inspiring things in different forums. I recently read a LinkedIn post by Jan about agile being over, and that’s one example of what I hope to chat with him about between the presentations. I often feel that we haven’t even started using agile in a decent way. 🙂

Welcome as a speaker at myConf 2024, Jan! I have huge expectations, and I know you will deliver on them! 🙂

/Jimmy Nilsson, CEO and Consultant at factor10