So proud of my team, Boom X (two generations), for fearlessly joining the SAAB Smart Airbase Hackathon this weekend! So much fun—and so much learning 👏

Being part of this event and working as a small product team at the forefront of vibe coding and AI-supported development was an incredible experience.

I would recommend this to anyone curious about how cutting-edge technology can be used to solve real customer problems. When vibe coding in a small product team, you end up innovating across all layers at the same time. You can truly work user-experience first—focusing on the customer problem, quickly delivering prototypes and end-to-end scenarios, and getting feedback that immediately impacts both the product and the evolving business strategy.

I learned a lot myself—making my first ever pull request and pushing to Git. As a former designer, product owner, and chief product owner, I’ve never really been that hands-on with coding until I started experimenting with Lovable about six months ago. This time we used VS Code, a more “hardcore” version of vibe coding. Luckily, I had my brother Daniel Blom on the team. He does full-stack AI-enabled development for a living—and, luckily for me, he also has enormous patience. 😉

Starting early by aligning on the customer problems we wanted to solve and agreeing on a shared strategy was crucial. So was defining the structure for the processes we were digitizing: the rules, the information flows, and what success would look like. We also used quick paper prototyping to create a shared foundation.

When everyone in a team can work simultaneously on the same product—with interconnected user scenarios and AI superpowers—product strategy becomes what makes or breaks your efforts. Even if you throw away prototypes or do work that ends up unused, you are still moving closer to creating value, as long as you focus on the most important customer problems.

The only thing that made me a bit frustrated during this otherwise amazing experience was having to work with a slower, less capable AI model after getting used to the best ones. 😅 That really threw me off. Suddenly, instead of giving me superpowers, the AI created more work—misunderstandings, friction, and unnecessary effort.

The short 5 min demo video of the prototype

This was the video the jury got to select the five finalist teams. Our team wasn’t among those five, but we were invited to the event in Linköping, which was a great experience in itself.

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The impact of short time boxes

The impact of extremely short timeboxes, like in a hackathon, is remarkable for creativity. At the same time, without deep domain knowledge and context, it’s hard to know whether you’re solving the most important problems—or solving them in the right way. Everything remains a hypothesis until it’s tested and proven in reality.

Our idea in short

Our concept had four parts:

1. A digitized simulation environment
We proposed building a digital simulation (inspired by a board game) where personnel at the airbase can train decision-making under pressure. Ideally, this would be as close to reality as possible—or even use the same interface as the real system.

2. Role-based user perspectives with AI support and Human in the Loop
The system adapts to different user roles, providing tailored views depending on context. AI would support decision-making in high-VUCA environments, help users stay updated, and highlight when critical information is missing—or where to get it. We made a decision early on to keep the human in the loop, meaning AI would not make decisions only provide suggestions for imput of data and decisions.

3. Continuous development through simulation
The simulation could act as a test environment to continuously evolve the system based on real needs. By training and building at the same time, developers and users work closely together—enabling fast, customer-focused product development. The airforce could then choose when to adopt new capabilities.

4. A new way of working
This approach could enable a new way of developing and operating software within the Swedish Air Force—and potentially across other parts of the military—together with partners such as SAAB.

Could events like this enable a better world?

My hope is that more managers and executives get to experience this firsthand. Spend just a day or two working alongside your teams, and you will quickly realize that giving them access to the best tools available is one of the most important strategies you can have. Any organization that locks itself into long-term contracts with only one—or just a few—AI models (even if they are the best today) will soon need to reinvest. The AI landscape is evolving incredibly fast, and staying flexible is key to unlocking these new superpowers.

All organizations who want to benefit from AI must adapt their decision making and their operational model. Maybe hackathons can be that high speed segway into the future most organizations need? A way to experience how AI-enabled product development can be done cross functionally – and also development of AI-tools? What if new systems can be built at high speed based on real user needs (not old specifications) – and in a safe way be tested? Could we then replace old legacy systems at speed too?

A big thanks to Olof Sundin and the team at SAAB and the Swedish Air Force for creating such a positive, energetic, inclusive and inspiring event!

I hope that many more will come and that the learnings will enable positive outcomes and a more safe world for everyone!

Konflikter eller oenigheter är vanliga i det dagliga livet. Det är ofta en kombination av två eller fler typer av konflikter. Var därför säker på att identifiera vilka typer av konflikter det handlar om och om möjligt, välj fler lösningsansatser.

Den här postern är framtagen tillsammans med Björn Sandberg.

Den här postern går igenom 5 typer av konflikter

• Intressekonflikt
• Maktkonflikt
• Mognadskonflikt
• Värderingskonflikt
• Missuppfattningskonflikt

Den visar också på 5 typer av lösningar

• Samarbeta
• Kompromissa
• Justera
• Undvika
• Kämpa eller tvinga

Välkommen att ladda ner den här postern i högupplöst PDF >

Maktkonflikt

Makt och auktoritet är det som de flesta tänker är grunden till alla konflikter. Maktkonflikter känner de flesta av oss igen från arbete och familj, där frågan handlar om vem som ska bestämma. Viljan att bestämma kommer tidigt, när barn vill ha kontroll över situationen – till exempel vilka kläder de ska ha på sig – för att få personlig makt och självkänsla.

Den negativa sidan av maktkonflikter kan vara så allvarlig som övergrepp eller missbruk. Det möjliga hotet om att förlora makt kan också vara en källa till konflikt i agila transformationer, när mandatet flyttas ut i teamen och kompetensen delas med andra i gruppen.

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Intressekonflikt

Den vanligaste typen av konflikt uppstår när två eller fler parter har olika perspektiv, behov eller mål som de värnar om och kämpar för att uppnå. Ett exempel är när förändring införs i en organisation och människor möts för att argumentera för sina ståndpunkter och försöka övertyga andra om att deras synsätt är det rätta. Om de inte kan nå en kompromiss eller en vinn-vinn-lösning, är det tillgången till makt och mandat som avgör vem som vinner eller förlorar.

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Auf diesem Poster habe ich einige Organisationsdesign-Muster aus agilen Produktorganisationen im großen Maßstab gesammelt.
Die hervorgehobenen Fragen können als Einstieg in verschiedene Themen dienen – etwa zu den Gestaltungsprinzipien der Organisation, zur Strategie für das Wachstum von Teams und Einzelpersonen, dazu, wie Autonomie und Ausrichtung ermöglicht werden können, und wie Führungsteams gestaltet werden können, um eine großartige Produktorganisation zu unterstützen und weiterzuentwickeln, die Produkte liefert, die Kundinnen und Kunden lieben.

Dieses Poster wurde ins Deutsche übersetzt von Andre Ullmann, kontakt@andreullmann.de

Download the German poster for free (high resolution PDF) >

Buy printed in size A1 >

Hervorgehobene Fragen zur Reflexion auf diesem Poster

• Wie messen wir Erfolg?
• Was sind unsere Leitprinzipien?
• Optimieren wir für Fluss (Flow)?
• Optimieren wir für Wert (Value)?
• Welche Fähigkeiten müssen wir skalieren?
• Wie ermöglichen wir den Informationsfluss?
• Was ist die minimale wertvolle Bürokratie (Minimum Valuable Bureaucracy)?
• Welche Rollen benötigen wir in unserem Führungsteam?
• Wie fördern wir das Wachstum von Teams und Einzelpersonen?
• Welche Arten von Teams brauchen wir?
• Wie ermöglichen wir sowohl Autonomie als auch Ausrichtung?
  
  

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This poster came to life based on common misunderstandings we have seen over and over again in organizations starting on the journey to become more product centric and outcome oriented. We hope that the poster can bring light to these patterns and support valuable dialoges around them.

We have vizualized some of the important patterns and missunderstandings – not all of them. The poster covers 4 important areas, Strategy, Execution and Delivery, Culture and Organization.

The culture shift is the result of the shifts made to enable, support and incentivise new behaviours connected to outcome and a trust based leadership. These new behaviours will only be possible if the structure is shifted to the right, on the product side.

Maybe you have already done some of these shifts? What else could be needed to move towards a more customer centric outcome oriented culture? Who do you need to collaborate closer with? Bring them together and discover the shifts using this poster and the insights shared in the short videos below here.

Download the poster for free (HIGH REZ PDF) >

Short videos covering each topic in the poster

The team behind the poster; Elinor Lange, Frank Olsen and Mia Kolmodin together with Johan Westerlunch and Natalja Calderon guide you through each topic during a short video. This served as our Christmas Calendar when we launched the poster in december 2025.

Customer Focus

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In this video we dive into one of the most fundamental, and probably most misunderstood, topics in modern organizations: Customer Focus.

Topics explored

• Many organizations believe they are customer-centric. But when it’s time to make real decisions, customer needs often fall behind internal priorities, project plans and budget structures.
• Why customer focus tends to fade in traditional project organizations
• How product organizations keep customer needs at the center – continuously
• Why product-oriented ways of working lead to stronger outcomes and better value delivery, for both customer and the business.

Funding Model

Topics explored

• How the funding model impact the product development – and what you could do to shift towards product.
• How project oriented funding often cause problems with knowledge retention which delay deliveries and also difficulties to deliver customer and business value.
• How incremental funding might be a better fit for many organizations.
• What organizations have done to get started moving towards a product oriented funding model.

People

Topics explored

• In project based organizations we tend to call people “recourses”. How shifting perspective to “people” and what lies behind that, changes everything and we build stronger teams, higher engagement, and a culture that supports real product-led ways of working.
• When reduce people to abstractions, we also reduce commitment, trust, and ownership. Words matter — because they shape how we lead.
• One of the reasons product organizations succeed is because people are empowered — not managed as resources.
  

Core values

In this video we explore the fundamental difference in view of core values in a project vs product organization.

Topics explored

• Many project-driven organizations emphasize predictability, plans, and control.
• Success is defined by adhering and delivering to the plan, and change is often seen as a disruption rather than an opportunity.
• Embracing learning and adaptability, often by fast feedback loops.
• Focus on time-to-money, on delighting customers, and on creating long-term, sustainable value.
• It’s a shift from valuing the plan to valuing the ability to learn and improve, and in doing so making the customer happy.
• Shifting to a product-driven way of working isn’t about abandoning structure, it’s about investing in learning, adaptability, and customer value.
• When we value customer needs over plans, we create organizations that move faster, make smarter decisions, and build products people truly love.

Ownership

In this video we explore how ownership works differently in project vs. product organizations.

Topics explored

• In project organizations, ownership often sits with the project manager, who controls tasks. This removes responsibility from the people doing the work, leading to lower motivation, less creativity, and a focus on delivering the project rather than improving the product.
• Modern product organizations distribute ownership to the teams closest to the problems. With mandate, involvement, and a focus on product outcomes, motivation increases and problem-solving thrives. And this leads to happier, engaged people and product success.
• Real ownership fuels motivation, creativity, and better products. Give responsibility to the people who can actually make a difference.

The team

In this video we explore how the prerequisites for, and use of, teams differ in project vs. product organizations.

Quality and Technical Debt

In this video we explore how quality and technical debt is handled differently in project vs. product organizations.

Topics explored

• In project organizations, focus is to deliver a fixed scope at a fixed deadline – with a high risk to build lower quality. And often the responsibility is separated from the responsibility for delivery, which makes it harder to build in quality.
• In modern product organizations the product teams are accountable for the quality AND delivery. They then have the possibility to build in quality in the work they do to deliver the product which can be done iteratively and incrementally – to meet the deadline. Here they can focus first on quality FIRST and THEN on the delivery which gives a sustainable pace and product.

Knowledge retention

In this video we explore how knowledge is built, kept, and used differently in project vs. product organizations.

Topics explored

• In project organizations, teams are often temporary. When a project ends, the team disbands and so does much of the knowledge. Valuable insights fade, and organizations find themselves reinventing solutions again and again.
• In modern product organizations, teams stay with the product over time. Knowledge compounds, learning accelerates, and problem-solving becomes faster and more effective. Multi-learning across skills and roles strengthens the team’s ability to deliver long-term value.
  

Primary objective

In this video we explore how the primary objective differ in project- vs. product organizations and what impact that has on delivery and the business value from the delivery.

Value realization

In this video we explore how value is perceived differently in project- vs. product organizations – and how that may impact the business outcome.

Flexibility

In this short video we explore how flexibility is perceived differently in project- vs. product organizations – and how you can enable it and benefit from having both flexibility in the solution – and strategic flexibility.

Time horizon

In this short video we explore what project vs product organizations tend to focus on, and put their effort into, based on the time perspective.

They also share how you can start moving towards a product perspective.

Organization

In this short video we explore how project vs product organizations tend to look like and work and why many organizations fail in their ambitions to become more product- and customer centric when they don’t adapt their organization.

You’ll also get a few tips on what you can do to start to move towards becoming more product oriented.

Dandy X-Lab – a structured way to make the shifts

Join us in this short video where we share both success cases doing this change – and the model, Dandy X-Lab. Dandy X-lab is designed to enable increased business value sooner together with our customers.

This is the most effective way to handle the transition from a project based organization to product oriented that we have ever seen. No more big bang, high risk and slow and unsecure ROI on change initiatives and business innovation as we connect customer centric innovation & delivery to the organizational development.

When the structures, WoW and management are working FOR your people, they will become the super heroes they are and we make that happen within a short time boxed period of time showcasing that it works. At the same time we build a bespoke scalable operational model for YOUR context.

This model is proven to work within all type of organizations and businesses.

Free to download, use and share

The posters are published under Creative Commons License, so please use it and share it as you like. If you are interested in doing a translation to any other languages, please let me know and I will help you with the file and publish it here on the blog as well.

You are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

This license is acceptable for Free Cultural Works.
The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

Under the following terms:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Here you find all the other Free Agile in a Nutshell-posters in the series that is now translated to 15 languages and downloaded over 100.000-times worldwide.

Really grateful for the invitation to give a closing keynote at Agila Sverige on the topic of Product-Led, among so many other amazing speakers.

I also enjoyed being part of the panel on the Product Operating Model together with Mikael Brodd and Jimmy Janlén.

I felt truly welcomed, had a lot of fun, learned something new, and left feeling energized. 🙂

A huge thank you to all of you in pink t-shirts 👚 for once again creating such a safe, fun, loving, innovative, thoughtful, and thought-provoking community. You rock! 🙌

Hope to see you all again next year!

Thank you Isabelle Svärd and Jimmy for the pics 📸

Creating a new organization from an old one is a lot about detangling and understanding what belongs where. If you have done it before, you might be able to see patterns that are helpful. Using visualization and working in a structured way, step by step, and involving the people in it are some helpful ways of working.

Just as always in the complex domain, you are better off not using good practices (the same solution as others). By going by it in an experimental way, step by step, you can more safely find good solutions based on design principles and patterns.

When thinking of it you might realize that it actually is pretty similar to building great products that customers love – based on a legacy system. So why not use similar ways of working?

When are starting out we need to see what we currently have, and even that is a complex endeavor. To get that shared picture of the current organization you can use different techniques, and usually, a good mix is needed. In this post, we will look into how you can map up current teams, products, and customer journey, and the state of the systems and start to see what teams might take ownership over what is a step-by-step approach.

Products and Services

As a start, you can start together to map up the products that your customers pay for. Those are what we commonly call products in an Agile organization. This is where some money is exchanged, and if it is on a monthly basis, it might then be a service.

Below you see an example of the overall products and services mapped out, for both B2B and B2C. There is no need to make this any fancier than this. If you might understand later that you actually have some more products, you can easily add them then if you create a scalable system.

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In this episode I met with Per Kristiansen to talk about serious games (or serious play as they call it at Lego) that we love using as a safe way for exploring complex strategy and play out different scenarios. Per tells the story how it all got started at LEGO when their CEO needed a better way to work with strategy and they created Lego Serious Play. Per was part of the internal research team that discovered that using lego bricks for simulation and learning was just as useful for adults as it is for children. He tells a fascinating story of how they first failed, but later discovered how to make it work and developed it to the metod that it is today, and how it has now expanded from being an internal method within Lego to a global phenomena that it is today.

The conversation starts with us sharing our purposes and values behind our two companies, Trivium and Dandy People, and it happens to be a perfect match 🙂

If you are interested in learning how to facilitate the Lego Serious Play Method Per travels all around the world to facilitate Lego Serious Play trainings and we are really happy to welcome him to Dandy People and Stockholm too

Read more and sign up for the 4 day Lego Serious Play Certification Course in Stockholm here

We are so happy to be able to share the Monotasking in a Nutshell Poster with you for free also in Turkish! Thank you so much Ender Yüksel for your awesome work with the translation 🙂

DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE: Here you can download it for free in high resolution >

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