Compact Class
Dynamics in IT

"How to deal with growth
and increased complexity
without increasing headcount."

My compact class vehicle

 

Founded in 1997

About 100 people

Offices in Berlin, Munich, Würzburg

2 Owners/CEO

"Chief Tailwind Officer"

10.03.20 First Corona Case in a customer team
11.03.20 Meeting "Ok, what should we do?"
12.03.20 Home-Office, Workflow and IT preparation
13.03.20 Everybody & everything is working remotely
19.03.20 Bits&Pretzels calls: VideoConference for 50.000 
21.03.20 First prototype works in benchmark, Go for B&P
29.03.20 Virtual Founders Breakfast with 35.000 Visitors
01.04.20 Vodafone,  WHU, ... ask for help
20.05.20 Joint Venture Mingle.Cloud GmbH with Bits&Pretzels

Change is easy

(if you are small)

✔ Agile for >20 years

✔ Still small

✔ A lot of startup experience

✔ Company is named after a ship

Some headwind
shouldn't
be an issue, right?
 

... right?

What is happening in Silicon Valley right now

Source: Doppelgaenger.io at OMR 2024

Decoupling growth
 from employees

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will Be the Biggest Technological Shift We See in Our Lifetimes

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google

This next generation of AI will reshape every software category and every business, including our own.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft

"They just want to sell their products"

AI can boost productivity at unprecedented speed.

First movers will be rewarded, and the global race is already on
without any question.

...

Twice the Invests of Europe

Goldman Sachs Study, a.k.a
"Who to fire next"

OpenAI/MIT on

"How much will your job change?"

Translators, Graphic Designers, Customer Support Agents
right now:

Programmer
Productivity *2

Just a phase: Assisted Work

https://www.coatue.com/blog/perspective/ai-the-coming-revolution-2023

Our AlphaGo
12/2023

March 23 Decision to use autonomous agents
April 23 integration performance 5-10 times faster
May 23 One team is replaced by autonomous agents
June 23 Roadmap Goals 2023 implemented
July 23 Requirements Management moved to pull
Aug 23 Focus on innovation and new opportunities

Actual Example

(if your process is specialized)

Case Study: E-Commerce, online shop integration into
                      Marketplaces, including ad-buying

  • 5-10 times faster time to market

  • costs reduced by factor 10

  • Weekly meetings for ideas, experiments and prototypes

https://hups.com/blog/are-developers-needed-in-the-age-of-ai

🧍

Human

🤖

Product Owner

🤖

Architect

🤖

Developer

🤖

Testing Agent

🤖

Inline-
Documentor

🤖

Code-Quality Agent

🤖

Confluence

Intermediate Feedback and Observation

Interaction and Curation

AI Agent based
team structure

Coatue AI Full Report Nov 2023, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gQhYT7j6b2wJmrFZHNeQgTiWPyTsjOfX/view

🧍

Human

🤖

Requirements

🤖

Architect

🤖

Developer

🤖

Testing Agent

🤖

Inline-
Documentor

🤖

Code-Quality Agent

🤖

Confluence

🤖

BugFix-Agent

AI team structure,
revisited

Ephemeral Code

  • Written by agents for agents
     
  • When it stops working it will be regenerated
     
  • No need for human readability
     
  • No need for documentation

It is not just less perks, ...
 

My education has been devalued.

My experience has been devalued.

My core tasks disappear.

My way of cooperation disappears.

 

 


"The agile transformation and corona
were just the in-game tutorial level."

"5-6 golden years."

Gold rush or
End of the World?

SCARF Impact
Status Your current status is 100% challenged
Certainty Future career prospects unclear
Autonomy Potential for a lot of autonomy
Relatedness Less social relatedness and interaction.
Fairness AI is unfair competition

Individual effects
of AI in software

  • Fast skill acquisition matters
     
  • >20% time to learn
     
  • "R&D mode for everyone"
     
  • Safe to fail Environments
     
  • Education is  more important

Continuous Discovery: Learning Culture

  • Fast discovery of opportunities
     
  • Constant reinvention
     
  • Ability to keep up
     
  • Fast organizational learning

Adaptability wins over Competence

Growth / Entrepreneurial Mindset

  • Opportunity orientation
  • Tolerance for ambiguity and failure
  • Creativeness and innovativeness
  • Self confidence and optimism
  • Initiative and responsibility
  • Proven track record of events where people were rewarded for ...
    • speaking up
    • disagreeing openly
    • innovation instead of success
    • mistakes as learnings

Resilience & Psychological Safety

  • This change is even for "life long learning" computer scientists too disruptive
     
  • Loss of control, pride, expertise and familiarity
     
  • Loss of narrative and trust

     
  • Mental Health is a now a collective workplace responsibility

Mental Health

Fun Fact 2: it will be easier for well established companies like this one to find software developers :-)

Fun Fact 1: Autonomous Driving is regarded a much harder problem than replacing lawyers, managers or software developers.

Thank You!