By Janus Boye
It’s hard to predict the future, but as the saying goes, the best way to predict the future is to study the past.
Thanks to Haiilo for hosting our end-of-year 2024 meeting in their charming Hamburg offices
At this year’s annual end-of-year collab meeting in Hamburg, we took a closer look at what we have learned in 2024 by bringing together our local groups with an open invite to other community members, and a few selected speakers to create a curated and packed afternoon with a dozen lightning talks.
This year, attendance surpassed previous years with a diverse set of digital leaders from large, complex and global organisations like Canyon, Jungheinrich, Lufthansa, OTTO alongside agencies such as Diconium and Thoughtworks as well as software firms like CoreMedia, Magnolia, Staffbase and a few other friends from near and far.
Employee communication platform software firm Haiilo hosted us in their charming offices, which was a fitting scene for learning and networking.
Below I’ve shared a shortened summary of each talk with my key takeaways. You can also jump directly to the summary from each talk:
Recent employee experience challenges
We opened by hearing from our host, both on their take on the current employee experience trends as well as a refreshing alternative to the usual Kanban or Scrum way of working.
Product Marketing Team Lead, Jan-Eike Rosenthal at Haiilo, shared insights into the connection between engaged employees and successful companies. Or, as he said: “It’s not simply enough to reach the employees with your news and stories, you also need to engage them.” That’s the harder part.
So why is this important? Jan-Eike shared recent research showing that 19% of German employees are not engaged with their company. That’s some 7 million employees in Germany which don’t do much more than what they are strictly required to. Another eye opening number from the same research was that 45% of German employees are either actively looking for a new job or open to new challenges. That’s a high number in my book, but as Jan-Eike said, the problem here is actually not a new one. It was bad before the pandemic, and things have not improved. Disengaged employees remain a persistent issue for the past decades.
Another well-known challenge for the employee experience is the problem of not having enough time. Specifically, internal comms teams face time crunches and the need for strategic solutions persists. Lack of budget is also a familiar issue as well as the lack of useful analytics — not knowing which campaign or initiative really made the difference remains an obstacle.
As one of his ‘2024 lessons learned’, Jan-Eike highlighted that too many tools create confusion, not clarity. A well-known challenge from start-ups that has now also crept into large corporations. Finally, he also mentioned the realisation that “one size fits all” is dead: Personalisation is the key to tackling information overload.
From Kanban/Scrum to Shape Up
Giving us a glimpse behind the scenes of how they work at Haiilo, VP Product Sven Hoffmann, shared how they have started working with the Shape Up agile framework.
Shape Up was originally developed by 37Signals (Basecamp), and in Shape Up the teams operate on fixed timelines called cycles, typically 6 weeks long. Between each 6 week cycle there is a 2 week “cool-down period” where teams can work on tasks that are not directly related to cycles. For example: technical debt or exploration of new ideas.
In his brief introduction to the framework, Sven also covered Shaping Pitches. Shape Up eliminates the idea of a backlog by using the concept of “pitches” that are submitted to the product team. Everybody in the company can submit an idea for a pitch and pitches are then “shaped” in parallel by the Product Manager, Engineering Lead and UX Designer.
So far, the experiences with Shape Up at Haiilo has been good. As Sven said, development teams like it because there are less meetings, more trust in their work, autonomy and ownership. Also, Product Managers love it because of the transparency and autonomy, despite that it entails quite some work to shape pitches.
If you want to learn more about Shape Up then check out the book: Shape Up - Stop running in circles and ship work that matters by Ryan Singer.
Doing clever things with LLMs
When it comes to AI and the impact of large language models (LLMs), we also didn’t look far into the past, but rather looked closely at recent 2024 lessons learned.
In an insightful and humorous talk titled “4 things I wish I had known before I started working with LLMs,” Tobi Stadelmaier, VP Engineering at Hamburg-based CMS vendor CoreMedia, shared some useful points:
Adopting AI is also a social challenge — where he mentioned the chasm between reality and (some) over enthusiastic senior executives saying that AI will solve all problems. He also weaved in Gartner research claiming that generative AI has reached the peak of inflated expectations
Prompting is the new programming. A key learning is that you can get fast responses with brief prompts, but they might not be accurate. For accuracy, you’ll need to give your prompt a few more details, similar to programming: The machine does what you tell it to do. For more on this point, see Gen AI prompting is just another programming language by Tom Cranstoun
You can use an LLM as a reasoning engine (rather than as a search engine on steroids). Rather than just using LLM as next gen search engine, he covered how LLM can be used as an AI agent that acts as an autonomous system that perceives its environment through sensors, processes information and takes actions to achieve specific goals
If it sounds like sci-fi, you will fail. A reminder, also to fellow engineers, to keep both feet on the ground, don’t be afraid to experiment and accept and embrace non-determinism. As he said: “Yes, Engineers aren't used to that. They'll get used to it.”
This was a shortened version of his Boye Aarhus 24 conference talk: Put AI to work! Five things you (probably) didn't know you can get a modern LLM to do.
For more on the business topic of LLMs, see this excellent piece by Cal Paterson: Building LLMs is probably not going to be a brilliant business.
A new definition of done for the work day
Leading with a question is usually a good way to make you think, and up next was Berlin-based design leader Hertje Brodersen, who gave a brief talk titled: “What might it mean to be done for the day?” The title is a slight adaptation from British journalist and time management guru Oliver Burkeman, who writes about what it means to be done.
She opened by sharing how, after leaving Zalando, she spent parts of her summer taking a break from modern desk work and instead worked in a bakery. Taxing in a different way, but also a good thought starter for how knowledge work is measured with old tools, and how the never ending productivity focus can be a killer for both creativity and wellbeing.
Hertje also weaved in this memorable quote from the “Re-Enchanting Work” episode of the famous podcast “Deep Questions with Cal Newport”.
“We've made cognitive jobs grinding and exhausting almost like we're toiling in a mental factory. We come to our nondescript desks and open up our screen and it just goes until we can't take any more.”
In the episode, they explore the theory and practice of “adventure working,” in which you escape to novel and inspiring locations to tackle your most demanding and interesting cognitive efforts. Sounds nice, right?
Staying with the problem just a little bit longer, Hertje also brought examples of how hustle culture is glamored with quotes from Jeff Bezos:
“You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon you can’t choose two out of the three”)
And also one by Kim Kardashian:
“Get your f*cking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days”
As you probably already know, this leads to worsening mental health, less enjoyment at work and increased staff turnover. Billions of work days are lost due to depression and anxiety caused by poor working conditions.
So, how do we change work for the better? Hertje wrapped up with a few thought starters:
Give your nervous system a break. Specifically, try to leave work at a reasonable time and don’t leave thinking there’s vastly more you could or should have done.
Ask yourself what you can reasonably expect yourself to do today. Hint: That list is uncomfortably short.
Be careful what you say “yes” to. Each new task comes with a set of additional admin chores and these quickly accumulate.
Work at a more natural pace. Again quoting Cal Newport: “Strive to reduce your obligations to the point
where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare.”
Stop anyway. Quoting from The Imperfectionist by Oliver Burkeman: “Stop ceaselessly chasing the imaginary
future point at which everything will have been handled, so that life can really begin.”
For more on the topic and Hertje’s deep thinking about modern work, you can download the slides (PDF) or see the notes from her popular 2023 members’ call: What is job love?
After an opening with expert talks, we then moved to the customer side, hearing unpolished, yet impressive, case studies from practitioners. First up was the German flag carrier Lufthansa.
Lufthansa Innovation Ecosystem
Joining us from Lufthansa Industry Solutions was Lukas Wolf, who talked about their approach to innovation management. Focusing on strategic innovation consulting, Lukas openly shared from their innovation suitcases, including how innovation can become embedded into the culture, going from idea generation to go-live and much more.
Among the highlights for me was when he opened the culture and strategy suitcase and went into details on how innovation starts with an assessment that includes understanding the organisation. This is then followed by the pitch development, including impact-effort analysis, and finally the innovation is anchored and implemented. Quite interesting to get a peak behind the scenes to the innovation work in such a large, complex and global organisation.
We also briefly saw a visual insight into innovation management and heard about how an innovation ecosystem can overcome obstacles and empower employees to innovate. Also, Lukas shared details on their innovation growth fund, where projects can receive funding for project implementation.
Finally, with a look towards 2025, we heard about Lufthansa's future plans. I was in particular happy to see their goal to strengthen relationships to scientific institutions and specifically involving students with thesis projects.
Moving on from innovation to websites and our next speaker.
An international rollout of new websites in 20 countries
Kris Lohmann from Engel & Völkers on stage ready to give his lightning talk
Joining from real estate company Engel & Völkers was Kris Lohmann, who works as their Global Head of Product Customer Platforms and has spent most of his 2024 rolling out a massive Storyblok-based new digital platform.
Key points incl.
getting buy in
hiding org complexity
improved search
MORE TO COME
Moving on, from websites to more behind the scenes and the topic of digital automation.
Automation stays automation
Patrick von Hardenberg is Automation Evangelist at German retail giant OTTO Group, where he has almost a decade of experience in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to alleviate employees from mundane tasks and unlock the full potential of RPA throughout the company.
His talk focused on his experiences over the past year regarding the impact of GenAI on traditional process automation, and he was quite blunt in his prediction that GenAI is significant and will eventually be integrated into everything we do. However, and similar to the insight from Tobi Stadelmaier earlier on the program, the current hype surrounding GenAI as the solution to all problems can be quite overwhelming.
Among his observations from the past year of working in their Center of Excellence (CoE) for RPA Automation, was that the demand for automation has significantly increased over the past year. His explanation is that this is partially due to the senior management push for GenAI, which has led to departments now looking into their processes to identify opportunities where GenAI can be applied to make things better. As Patrick said, this search can be eye opening, leading many processes to be identified for automation using conventional tools like RPA or low code platforms.
Even when processes are identified that could benefit from automation, it often turns out that the AI component comprises only about 30% of the overall process, with RPA handling the remaining 70%. And RPA, while initially often sold as a temporary solution, stays RPA and keeps adding value to the organisation.
And for the final customer story, we stayed at OTTO Group but moved from automation to design leadership.
OTTO Discovery School
Wolf Brüning is lead UX designer at OTTO and he gave us a fascinating look at how they have improved the discovery part of projects - in other words: Helping their organisation to create customer centric products.
A key slide as shown by Wolf Brüning, UX designer at OTTO - the difference between discovery - building the right product, versus delivery - building the product right.
He opened by sharing some brief background on where they were around a decade ago. In brief: A fine-tuned delivery organisation that kept building products and exploring innovative usage of all the fancy new digital tech, but were they building the right things? They had no standards for product discovery and user centered development. Some teams did great discoveries, some treated it more like project management for designers and some didn’t do it at all.
They needed to put a stronger emphasis on product discovery and with ownership of the discovery process up for grabs, the UX team seized the day and took it. They turned UX Designers and UX Researchers into ambassadors in the product teams for user centric product development and to help the teams to do product discovery.
Still, they needed to do better. Using only UX Designers and UX Researchers as multiplicators simply wasn‘t enough. New team members and stakeholders from other departments were joining the discoveries without understanding how and why they were working like they did. They needed to raise the bar and introduce a new mindset and out of this need OTTO Discovery School was born.
The big goal with OTTO Discovery School was to move away from the “delivery machine” towards user centric products and they also wanted to establish a common framework to ensure quality and efficiency. And furthermore to improve collaboration between disciplines, teams and business units.
Status end of 2024 is that they have completed almost 50 workshops, all organised by the UX teams, with some >500 participants and it has become one of the most recommended programs at OTTO‘s product organisation. Still there are challenges, as OTTO’s tech organisations has grown tremendously during the past years from 8 to over 100 product teams and even despite being educated, people forget or fail or are prevented to work more user centric.
To address these challenges, Wolf shared a bit from his 2024 work on relaunching the workshop, improving the discovery toolbox and interestingly, also how they have introduced a new discovery school for management. This is a 2 hour workshop that help managers to understand the benefits of user centered product development and the needs of their teams.
Following these fascinating customer stories, we moved on to the third and final section of expert speakers.
J.E.D.I. mind tricks to build better products
With inspiration from the famous Obi-Wan series, Hamburg-based product leader Lisa Mo Wagner, used the opportunity to delve into how Jedi mind tricks can guide us towards building better products.
While she didn’t venture into the mythical, she applied a few important truths to be found in her interpretation of 'JEDI': Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.
Lisa had this familiar illustration on the differences between equality, equity and justice as a part of her slides
She opened by clarifying the terms — the key components of our JEDI approach for building better products:
Diversity encapsulates all of our differences, which can either offer advantages or pose barriers to opportunities. Some distinctions are immediately noticeable, like skin colour or gender - but many other important aspects of diversity aren't as readily apparent.
Inclusion emphasizes fostering a sense of belonging by centering, valuing, and amplifying the voices, perspectives, and styles of those who typically encounter more barriers due to their identities.
Equity underscores allocating resources so everyone can access the same opportunities. Recognizing that advantages and barriers exist enables us to strive toward more equitable outcomes.
Justice revolves around dismantling barriers, paving the way for broader access to resources and opportunities.
Having clear terms helps, and like other speakers Lisa brought good questions for us to have in mind for our product management work toward 2025:
What is the impact?
Who am I talking to?
Who am I excluding or leaving behind?
Is what I am doing accessible?
Are these questions just an afterthought?
Personally, I feel that we are making progress on this agenda, but we still have a long way to go, also, to be blunt, when it comes to our events. There’s still room for improvement and I found Lisa’s talk very inspirational. Her point of “design with them and not for them” is a useful reminder, and two of my favourite quotes from the talk even came packaged in fitting Star Wars branding:
You must unlearn all you have learned
Your focus determines your reality
Lisa also convincingly covered overcoming bias and how important it is to understand the privileges your team has, and the perspectives that are missing. She closed with the below slide — a call to action for all of us to do better:
For more details, you can either download the slides (PDF) or read more in this piece from 2020: Expert of the month: Lisa Mo Wagner.
Rethink digital collections at MKG
The Museum for Kunst and Gewerbe, commonly referred to as MKG, is one of the most important museums of applied arts in Europe and a very popular museum in Hamburg. We were joined by digital cultural heritage expert Antje Schmidt who has worked at the museum since 2012 and she shared a fascinating story of how they started to rethink their digital collections and ended up embracing new ways of working.
She opened by highlighting with three ingredients for the museum of tomorrow:
Networked, Experimental, Open
In my view, these are probably also the key future ingredients in any other complex organisation. Perhaps museums, as our slow moving gatekeepers of the past, can help show us the way?
In her lightning talk, Antje shared a specific example from a recent project that tried to answer this big question:
How can museums engage people with their collections online and better serve the needs of different communities?
Since 2020, the MK&G has been developing alternative ways into its digital collection within the international cooperation project NEO Collections. They started with listening, in particular to the so called heavy users of their online collection. These are the frequent users, e.g. researches who use it for their work, and they were all happy to talk to MKG. They also met with other museum users, like:
designers/artists who were reusing images for their own creative work
a creative entrepreneur who was using online collections as source of inspiration
teachers from hamburg who use online collections in art education
a data scientist who analyses big data from online collections
an author who wrote a novel about objects from the MKG
Discovery mode, please - but inside the comfortable museum bubble zone. A humorous slide as a part of the lightning talk by Antje Schmidt. The illustration is created by the good folks at graphicrecording.cool
They also did a fellowship for a more participatory approach and you can read more about all of it in this post: Using emotion to breathe life into museum collections (Medium, free registration required)
In closing and to summarise their lessons learned, Antje highlighted their focus on listening instead of jumping to conclusions and also their efforts to let go of control and trust. Finally, she closed with a few challenges that are also relevant to most organsations for future discussion in 2025:
How to continue with experimentation and working with others?
How to communicate why this is important?
How to bring innovations back into the workflows?
Finally, moving on to to our very last speaker, who actually gave two “talks”.
Your tech is complex. Your message shouldn’t be
Joining us from Cologne, was Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire, a charismatic communicator with a strong following at the intersection of open source software, business, community, and culture. He works as Partner at Open Strategy Partners, a boutique agency focused on B2B content marketing.
Jam, as he is commonly known as, opened by sharing how his firm helps tech companies align marketing strategy and content with their vision and technical truth to generate leads, win customers and gain advocates. In other words, it’s about understanding the target market, audiences, market category, and unique selling proposition.
Or in brief: Open Strategy Partners are tech marketers for tech companies. To me, that’s interesting and relevant, as the marketplace remains confusing for buyers - there’s a real need for clarity coming from vendors.
He then used some humorous examples of the (lack of) digitalisation in Germany as a segue into an alphorn performance on love, home and death. You can catch a brief glimpse of that as recorded by my smartphone below.
Learning together towards 2025
I learned much new from the many talks, and also enjoyed catching up with members. To the participants some talks might have been more relevant than others, but the magic wouldn't be there if everything was what you thought you needed right now. Who knows what 2025 will bring?
Thanks to Haiilo for hosting us and making it possible to bring our community together and prepare for next year in a friendly and down-to-earth setting. If you want to look a bit further back, why not browse from the end-of-year 2023 session, which I covered in this post: What might 2024 bring?
Once we’ve landed in 2025, we have a full learning program in Q1. There’s CMS Kickoff 25 in January in Florida, where we have a few European participants, including from CoreMedia, Kentico, Kontent.ai, TYPO3 and Umbraco. There’s also local meetings in all our peer groups.
Hope to see you there!