SaaS Nichification // TeamOS // Why we Reinvent The Wheel // Emerging Chinese Management Praxis

Dear readers,

Welcome back to our Boundaryless Dispatch. A fortnightly update where we connect the?trends?we spot, the?patterns?we identify,?and research threads from our backstage. This dispatch is also available as the opening of our official newsletter?The Rules of the Platform Game ?where you can also find 10-ish curated reads, videos, and podcasts with comments that you should really not miss.?Subscribe to the full newsletter ?if you also want to access the curated links list in an organized way, and other perks.

In this edition, we update you on some of the research threads we see emerging from our practice. Catch up with our latest essay about the importance of creating a visual product portfolio and sharing innovative practices for organizations that want to be more adaptive. Check it out here.

Now let's jump into the research!?

We’re entering an age of software abundance. Creating new software (as a Service) is becoming easier by the day. In his recent “Internet Computers ” a splendid Packy McCormick writes (through a Bill Gates quote that dates almost thirty years back):

It’s not controversial to say that it’s easier to create great software products today than it was a decade ago. And as something gets easier, more of it happens. “Both the variety and volume of the software will increase.” I think that SaaS is going to be a tough category to invest in not because so few great SaaS products are going to be built, but because so many are! Great software is going to become commoditized.?

Despite McCormick focusing his analysis on the role of the Browser in such a transition, the piece contains some great insights. The comment resonates with our recent analysis of the trends we’re seeing in?product modularity, and in the progressive “horizontalization” of software ecosystems . With the advent of plug-ins, extensions,?apps,?and no-code the world of Software as a Service is moving away from a focus on vertically integrating the stack of user needs into a more evolutionary and integrative path. This scenario involves seeking to integrate, expand, and extend into adjacent use cases, not only by creating different product modules but, increasingly, by seeking integrations with other software pieces, in the cloud, through different patterns.

If anything else, the problem of converging into standards is made more relevant because of this evolution: the fact that the browser will be a new OS will likely solve the distribution problem (Mc Cormick envisions the birth of multiple app stores), but - as humans - we are less interested in what type software we run and more to the extent to which we can cooperate easily across software and across organizations.

Not Reinventing the Wheel: the convergence towards standard languages, standard interfaces, and shared data models.

It’s a while since at Boundaryless we’re studying how convergence is driven into ecosystems. We do it to help our customers better understand how to make the products they build and the “standards” they adopt more relevant: in network-based ecosystems-based strategies, adopting the language that is the most spoken produces advantages. Building a market penetration strategy around “legitimacy” - making the reference ecosystem accept your domain abstractions as appropriate to build upon - is a massively important and strategically relevant topic.

We realize we’re quoting a recent interview we had with Alberto Brandolini (coming up?next week on the podcast ) too often recently, but It’s worth doing it again. While we were speaking about this problem (why people tend to reinvent the wheel) he brilliantly pointed out this (false) lego brick metaphor:

…every single time you spend so much time searching for?the piece you're looking for, and then evaluate: "is it really right for me? What might be the consequences? What is the license?" This takes an awful amount of time.

Sometimes is it just more rewarding to just say?"well, I'm gonna develop mine, I'm gonna put it on GitHub and make it available to other people and making the problem of selecting the perfect solution harder for the next one to come“

So it's messy [and if you] add humans and their habits for learning and forgetting, plus a little bit of personal reward and recognition. I think it's going to stay messy."

In a few words, sometimes, reinventing the wheel feels easier! And even more rewarding. This doesn’t mean that the question is not worth checking.

Performance Pressure: the need to roam through different platforms

In a more than seminal piece of content (that dates back to 2014),?The hero’s journey through the landscape of the future , John Hagel pointed out that a constant and mounting?performance pressure?towards users, their need to perform better, learn and leverage their reputation across different creation spaces, means that platform owners have to progressively break their walled gardens to remain relevant. I’m not sure if we’re already experiencing this yet and fully but certainly, the question of convergence is popping up repeatedly in our cone of vision and it’s becoming central to our work.

A few days ago, following an internal reflection, Simone posted an open question on Twitter:?What's the alternative to everybody building ecosystems centered on themselves? ?and just a few days later, we encountered a?LinkedIn post by Joost Schouten ?from nestr.io that argued on LinkedIn that purpose-driven organizations should ponder deeply about how they approach?competition.

Joost’s post didn’t click a new button with us as we’ve been wrangling with this question (and in this very space!?orgtech) for more than one year and a half now. We’ve been?preliminary researching the development of a new software ecosystem initiative ?to enable adopters of unit-based, contract-based, entrepreneurial, and ecosystemic organizations to allocate and distribute capital and autonomy, allocate outcomes and skin in the game more easily, and generally adopt a unit-based, and contract-based model of organizing, that according to our understanding at Boundaryless is instrumental to overcome the pitfalls of industrial organizations.

It’s interesting how even focusing only on this space, we can see three different vectors, all targeting the issue convergence, in different ways.

On one side, the?web3?space is objectively pioneering this new dimension of unit-based, semi-autonomous organizations (not without issues) and has a?bubbling DAO Tooling space . As a demonstration, if one checks out?our recent piece on “primitives” ?of unit-based organizing, one will see how most of the tools we mention are web3 native ones. In this context, the?Daostar initiative ?seems a rather interesting and?well-supported ?one. In recognition of the vaguely defined concept, Daostar has created a rather low bar and aims at standardizing two basic primitives:

“In this standard, we assume that all DAOs possess at least two primitives: membership and behavior. Membership is defined by a set of addresses. Behavior is defined by a set of possible contract actions, including calls to external contracts and calls to internal functions. Proposals relate membership and behavior; they are objects that members can interact with and which, if and when executed, become behaviors of the DAO.”

On another hand, the corporate space has also been experimenting with such a form of unit-based organizing, and it has produced a plethora of approaches, all resonant as we noted in our?Converging towards a Common Protocol of Organizing . Some of these approaches are very much inspired by the software development realm (e.g.?Team Topologies, the?Spotify model/non-model, the recently created?Unfix model…) others are more inspired by other traditions (Sociocracy, the derived?Holacracy, the?Rendanheyi,?Amoeba management, etc…). Most of these methods refer to concepts such as Single-Threaded leadership, separated P&L, and autonomous management and distribution of funds and seem to be a new - solid - vogue, taking shape?from the East to the West. ?This convergence is what we’re capturing with the?3EO framework ?abstraction.

Eventually, the startup space it’s also catching up with this trend, and if you read the amazing?coverage of A.Team from The Generalist , you’ll see how?A.Team ’s “cloud teams” idea resonates with this trend. Raphael Ouzan , the founder, and a?former guest on our podcast ?is pushing a very ambitious vision.?A.team ?aggregates professionals into independent, venturing teams, that seek opportunities to be hired through a platform. By aggregating a precious supply of teams, and talent,?A.Team ?creates a very attractive possibility for brands that would otherwise be forced to face their own bureaucratic impasse:

"Imagine you’re the Chief Innovation Officer of a Fortune 500 tasked with reinvigorating a legacy business line. How would you do it? Here are a few options:?

1. Pull together an internal team. You might choose to assemble in-house talent to tackle the problem. While this would be the fastest way to get started, it might not be the most effective. Large incumbent businesses often don’t have the most innovative tech talent ready; the best developers tend to go to Google and Stripe, not CVS Health.
2. Hire new full-time employees. Ok, so you don’t have the right talent on-hand – but maybe you can hire it? That may be tricky. As mentioned, many large companies are not preferred destinations for digital workers. It’s also expensive and inflexible. If your project hits a speed bump (or worse), winding it down will likely be complicated.
3. Hire a traditional consulting firm or agency. When a big company needs to make an important decision, they’ve historically sought the help of large consultancies like McKinsey, Bain, or Accenture. While they can conduct valuable research, implementation is usually beyond their remit, particularly regarding cutting-edge tech. Agencies can help ship products, but they don’t tend to be nimble, startup-style operations. Both are expensive.?
4. Assemble a collection of individual contractors. You may decide you can cook up a flexible solution yourself, cobbling together freelancers from gig-based platforms and referrals. That is likely to be an exercise in frustration. Expect wide variations in quality and difficulties coordinating different parties. If any part of your project requires collaboration, you’ll have to figure out how to bring these disparate practitioners into a cohesive team.

A.Team has introduced a fifth way. It offers high-caliber talent at a lower price than old-school consultancies, united as a team. Critically, this talent is not just there to survey, observe, or consult – they’re there to build. Instead of pulling together a PowerPoint or Excel model, A.Team builds products, putting ideas in contact with reality."

As Gabriele points out in the piece, Ouzan’s ambition doesn’t stop at aggregating supply (becoming a de facto reference point for organizations that seek a rapid option to quickly onboard and offboard teams) but he also foresees further possibilities to marketize its enabling software:

"the software A.Team has built to run its marketplace could prove extremely valuable for other companies as a kind of “team OS,” helping optimize a blended workforce”

Besides the general meta-problem of convergence on shared standards, certainly, this very question of the emergent role of team-to-team, and team-to-org interfacing deserves to be looked at through a value-chain perspective.

What is going to be the role of aggregating supply (talent) and reputation? What's the role of standardizing primitives such as contracting, invoicing, and payments? What motivation will teams have to create inside or for an organization as creation tools?powered by the new generations of AIs ?take hold? What’s going to be the effect of remote work becoming the standard? What role will public registries over blockchain have? Is the shared governance of such interfaces and data a sufficient driver for convergence in the face of increasing modularity?

So far - and not only in this space but more generally in the platform economy - the playbook has often been that of:

1. subsidizing scale with large investments
2. becoming a "defacto" standard through an aggressive go-to-market strategy

The process is showing cracks: as verticals emerge which are keener to niches - because at the end of the day making and operating software is ever easier - we can expect to evolve in the direction of a plethora of vertical tools, easier integration between them and easier use cases personalization.

As McCormick said playing the scale game in SaaS is going to be even more complicated.

In this specific meta-context of?orgtech?- an arena of opportunities but also a fundamental layer of all the other arenas - we may possibly see an alternative rise of a “universal translator" - a minimum common denominator, that looks like a series of adapters that you use for communication. A bit like the ones you find for plugs at airports: no one wants to change all the plugs to adhere to a standard, but when a traveler comes in, you still want to give her the possibility to interact.

At the end of the day, a space that has lagged back for decades: the technology we use to organize, entrenched in bureaucracy, industrialism, and inertia may hold transformations so profound that could enable a completely new way of looking at collaboration and help us prototype the?institutions of the future , beyond the frames we are used to thinking about.

Check back on our interview with A.Team's CEO Raphael Ouzan: he speaks about “cloud-based teams”, dive into what they mean and analyzes what perspectives such teams open up for organizational development.

Boundaryless Conversations Podcast S4 Ep.5 –?Growing and evolving organizations through Cloud Teams - with Raphael Ouzan

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