Bas Vodde, in the bay area. One of the founders of LeSS.

Boss: How can we get the same fun dynamics of a single team but working with multiple teams?

Because often they add so much stuff and bureaucracy and distance between the teams and the actual users, that it’s no fun anymore.

 

Lancer: So you’re trying to scale the fun part as well as just, you know, we can get work done.

 

Boss: but well, I wouldn’t say skilled, but I often know me and me and Craig, Craig Larman, co-creator of LeSS. We’re often asked what do you do? And uh, we both, uh, over time, uh, gotten to a different standard on, through to that question. And Craig likes to say that he likes to reduce pain and suffering in product development. And I kind of liked that, but I don’t answer that myself usually because one of the things, one of the reasons I enjoy working with large organizations is that almost always, I find a lot of smart people, but they do such stupid things. So I often wondered how is it possible that when we take 100 smart people together that they end up doing such a stupid thing. And that dynamic for me is fascinating and there’s a lot of the organizational dynamics in that. And discovering those dynamics is one of the things that that kind of drives me my interest in, in this.

 

I remember early in my career in the, uh, in the nineties working with a team of three people that was fun. And then I worked with a team of four people. But that was where I built a product with only one team. So after that already it became steam. So 30 people on a team, of hundreds of people. And in the beginning I was just like, like most people just to kind of a victim in the indebt environment. I’m assuming that that’s how it works and assuming that it should work like that and people choose to work like that, but after you know, at exploring more, talking more people are getting more experienced quickly, I discovered that they don’t necessarily know how they should work or wanting to work that way, but it’s often just an effect of lots of dynamics and assumptions. And I became more and more interested in why that happens.

 

Next episode Dhaval Pachal and Bas Vodde will join us and together we’ll discuss the assumptions that lead us into problems with scaling.