Vertical SaaS is Multi-Product // Wrapping up on the Podcast Season // Entering the Age of Composability // Agile and RenDanHeYi
Dear readers,
this issue of the dispatch is going to be softer than usual - as we dive into the summer - we’re taking it a bit slower: hopefully, it will help new ideas emerge or - just - give us a chance to recharge in front of a certainly challenging year as 2023 has been on many shows. To explore and reflect on the benefits of taking time off and maintaining a balanced approach to work and life, you can pick from our friend and former guest of the Podcast , Sharetribe’s CEO, Juho Makkonen that recently shared a poignant reflection on the topic .
On our side, we must say that our newsletter curation work will go ahead throughout the summer, but you could expect our writing pace to slow down a bit on the blog . To help you catch up with the work we've been doing this year, it's to be noted that last week we also released the last episode of Season 4 of the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast . It’s a situational update with our long-time friends and mentors, Internet pioneer and Boundaryless co-founder Lisa Gansky and management thinking extraordinaire, Prof. Bill Fischer .
Worth mentioning that - a few days later - we also released a season epilogue . The latter contains a commentary on our recently released research compass , and a sort of farewell by one of the podcast co-hosts, Stina Heikkil? , who is stepping off the regular co-hosting role after more than 80 episodes and more than three years.
Stina has been a great contributor to the steering of the podcast so far and has been weaving greatly the typical topics dear to Boundaryless such as org development, product design, and platform-ecosystem thinking to the questions of sustainability, urban development, and more - in line with her main focus of work. We just want to thank Stina heartfully for her dedication, and curiosity that she poured into Boundaryless in the last few years. Now that she’s looking into different priorities. Stina will remain as a Boundaryless contributor and likely appear as a co-host of the show in the future, more sporadically.
Contextually with Stina easing on the project we want to make an opening to our community: if you are a long-time listener of the podcast, and you have dreamed about contributing to it, as a potential co-host or editor, if you speak fluent English (not like Simone ??) and you have a content-based reputation - i.re. you write or produce A/V content regularly - on the topics that the podcast is covering (or should cover) feel free to reach out to us so we can talk about a potential contribution and bring you inside the conversation.
A Horizon Project in Search of Partners
In the meantime a message from the back of the room: Boundaryless is building a proposal for the upcoming research funding call: HORIZON-CL2-2024-TRANSFORMATIONS-01-09: on “The role of social economy in addressing social exclusion, providing quality jobs and greater sustainability” - Check the call in details here . If you have been following our work so far, you probably noticed that we are interested in exploring the potential of citizen-based self-organizing around financial, and organizational templates for the foundational economy (check this post to know more) and we're now building a research proposal for this call: if your organization is based in the EU and has experience in participating or - even better - coordinating Horizon project proposals and you’re interested and have a track record on these topics please reach out!
The age of Multi-product - even in Vertical Saas
Content-wise, these weeks have also been a hot spot for engaging with great ideas that are related to what’s emerging as a key team of our work, that of modularity and composability in products and organizations. We wrote extensively about these questions but the interesting thing is that - week after week - we seem to encounter great work that resonates with our unfolding work in the space.
Something that caught our eyes this week - and you’ll see two pieces of content featured in the full curation on the full newsletter - is the work that Tidemark is doing on Vertical SaaS. In their Vertical SaaS Software Project - which is by the way approaching 2.0 release for which you should certainly stay tuned - they promote a key idea: to win vertical markets you’ve to become a multi-product company. In today’s newsletter, you’ll find a link to their recent essay Platforms of Compounding Greatness where they introduce so well something we’re also exploring with our customers and adopters: in increasingly saturated markets the companies that win are the ones that develop multiple cores of product value and successfully manage to adopt so-called “patterns of expansion”. In the linked essay they explain for example how to go from a core product to additional ones that complete the workflow (“follow the workflow”) and - furthermore - to move from one key customer to other customers connected to them, for example in a financial relationship (“follow the money”).
Don't forget to check the podcast episode on Invest Like The Best that David Yuan recently recorded!
As David Ulevitch said once - and you can get the frame in another of the curated posts of today’s newsletter - products need to be easy to use at first and can only “earn the right to be complex ” after they delivered the right value to the customers.
Entering the Age of Composability: Implications in organizational structures, management thinking, and more.
These major market transformations, mainly framable as promoting a transition towards product-centricity, team-centricity, modularization, and componentization… are profound and - we believe not understood yet in their full impact. Looks like the curve is picking up, also as a consequence of the recent developments in blockchain, AI, and more, and it feels like we’ve yet to develop a management and Organizational development approach that fully integrates this transition. Despite some of the management capabilities of prior “waves” are still meaningful today (not everything in scientific management is the be thrown off the cliff even, not to mention agile principles that have timeless importance) looks like the debate in the management and organizational development conversation, characterized too often by ideological attacks, is profoundly inadequate to the massive, exponential shift we’re about to see impacting our economies and organizations.
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At Boundaryless we feel we are sitting right there at the black dot, conscious of speed and depth of change, and ready to contribute to a new wave of organizational, product, and platform design thinking that is up for the challenge
Agile and RenDanHeYi
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Based on evidence that emerged through our participation at the InAgile conference in Prague, this article offers initial insights into the overlap, positioning, shared values, and convergences between RenDanHeYi compared to agile practices.
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