It’s undeniable that the role of software in any modern organisation is essential – untangling software from the organization is almost impossible today. With new solutions emerging as part of the low-code or no-code movement, what’s the best way to organise around software effectively? Why is it so important to remove hand-offs between teams and to ensure that self-directed teams can be enabled by platforms? What are the overlaps between the world of DevOps and the work we’re doing at Boundaryless around ecosystemic, and entrepreneurial organizations?
 
To better understand these questions, we bring on Matthew Skelton, co-author with Manuel Pais of ‘Team Topologies: organizing business and technology teams for fast flow’. It’s a seminal text that speaks about how to build the best team structure around the role that software has for your specific organisation.
 
Matthew is recognised by TechBeacon in 2018, 2019, and 2020 as one of the top 100 people to follow in DevOps. He curates the well-known DevOps team topologies patterns at devopstopologies.com. He is also Head of Consulting at Conflux and specialises in continuous delivery, operability, and organisation dynamics for modern software systems. 
 
In this conversation, Matthew helps highlight the real impact of digital transformation on companies, and what it means for team coordination. Join us as we explore key insights from his and Manuel’s book ‘Team Topologies’, low-code development platforms, API-drivenness, observability, and the impact of market validation and software-centric ways of organizing.
 
Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our Medium publication: https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast-S2E20-Matthew-Skelton 
 
To find out more about Matthew’s work:
 
> Website: https://teamtopologies.com/ 
> LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewskelton/ 
> Team Topologies Academy: https://academy.teamtopologies.com/ 
> Team Topologies Partner Program: https://teamtopologies.com/partner-program

Other references and mentions:

> Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, 2019: https://www.amazon.com/Team-Topologies-Organizing-Business-Technology/dp/1942788819  
> IT Revolution: https://itrevolution.com/ 
> Domain Driven Design Community: https://www.dddcommunity.org/
> Core Domain Charts: https://github.com/ddd-crew/core-domain-charts
https://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html
> “Building Extensible Platforms”, Shopify case study: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GqGNA8GnOOE&feature=youtu.be 

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 7 June 2021.

S2 Ep. 20 Matthew Skelton – On the Convergence between Software and Organizations

If you’ve heard any of the terms “open source software”, “web 2.0”, or “government as a platform”, you’ll be familiar with today’s guest – Tim O’Reilly – who has helped popularise these big ideas.  
 
Tim is the founder, CEO, and Chairman of O’Reilly Media, the company that has been providing the picks and shovels of learning to the Silicon Valley gold rush for the past 35 years. The company's online learning and knowledge-on-demand platform at oreilly.com is used by thousands of enterprises and millions of individuals worldwide, and has a long history of convening conversations that reshape the computer industry.  Tim is also a partner at early-stage venture firm O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and on the board of Code for America. He is the author of many technical books published by O’Reilly Media, and most recently ‘WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us’. 
 
He is a visiting professor of practice at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London, headed by Mariana Mazzucato – mentioned more than once in this conversation – and is working on a new book about why we need to rethink antitrust in the era of internet-scale platforms.
 
In today’s episode, which is the Grand Finale for this season, we explore the future of internet-enabled organizations, and how to think about value creation and regulation of these tech-companies.  Listen on to find out what we can learn from the Golden Age of the internet, how platforms like Google and Amazon have lost their way over the years - and are now breeding their own competition - and what Tim thinks about Government-funded innovations. As the software industry is becoming more at the heart of everything in society, we need to create systems that enable more value than they capture. 
 
If you want to hang on a bit after Tim’s final words, the co-hosts bring a brief wrap-up of the season and let you know the next plans for Boundaryless research activities. It’s been quite a ride this season too, and we are so grateful for both our loyal listeners and every guest who are pushing the boundaries of the future of organizing.
 
Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our Medium publication: https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast-S2E21-Tim-O'Reilly 
 
To find out more about Tim’s work:
 
> Website: https://www.oreilly.com/ 
> LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timo3 
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/timoreilly

Other references and mentions:

> Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound, 2021: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amazon-Unbound-Brad-Stone/dp/1398500968
> Tim O'Reilly, 'The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It?', 2021: https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-end-of-silicon-valley-as-we-know-it/
> Tim O’Reilly, ‘Why Elon Musk Is So Rich?’, 2021: https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-elon-musk-is-so-rich/
> Tim O’Reilly, WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, 2017, https://www.amazon.co.uk/WTF-Whats-Future-Why-Its/dp/0062565710/
>  Adam Smith, Supermoney, 1972: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Supermoney-Wiley-Investment-Classics-Smith/dp/0471786314/r
> Time O’Reilly, ‘The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It?’, 2021: https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-end-of-silicon-valley-as-we-know-it/


Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 24 June 2021.

S2 Ep. 21 Tim O’Reilly – How Software is Infusing the World and What it Means

MAQE, a digital firm in Bangkok, is working to adopt the Rendanheyi by marrying Haier's philosophy and designing its own playbook, including a set of conditional contracts tailored to the specific context of a SME technology services company in Thailand.

In this session, we had the chance to get into MAQE's own exploration and transition towards the Rendanheyi directly through the words of Andreas Holmer, its co-founder, and CEO.

Through an open conversation, we have specifically touched upon how to take inspiration from the Rendanheyi to:

- Infuse entrepreneurship into small service-based businesses 
- Augment agile structures through micro-enterprises
- Integrate sociocratic / holacratic governance with Rendanheyi's platforms and artifacts
- Incorporate and share ownership of new businesses through contracts 
- Nurture human potential and specific values without sacrificing profit

#11 MAQE's Journey Towards The Rendanheyi

A $40B firm in the top 10 Global IT service companies, during the last 20 years, Fujitsu has been focusing on outsourcing and selling IT products.
Running an IT outsourcing business largely means risk management and strong governance to ensure the right solution is offered to the right customer at the right price while ensuring sustainable margins for the firm.
Still, Fujitsu's market has dramatically changed during the last few years due to a steady migration towards the cloud, digital solutions, and entirely different service models. In such a context, gaining the ability to answer customer demand quickly has become both critical and more challenging.
In this interview Bruno Sirletti, our guest in this EEEO conversation and VP Cloud & Digital Business Western Europe at Fujitsu, explains how Rendanheyi helped Fujitsu gain agility towards customer demand.

3EO - Fujitsu

In this first episode of Season 3, we talk to Jack du Rose and Aron Fischer from Colony.io — an infrastructure for internet native companies and a key player in the evolution of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs). 

Jack du Rose is a former jeweller, current blockchain nerd, and founder of Colony. He is excited by the power shift our decentralized future brings. When not making $100m diamond skulls, or paradigm shifting social platforms, Jack enjoys sesquipedalianism, bathos, and a nice cup of tea and a sit down.

Aron Fischer graduated with a PhD in Mathematics in 2015. Since then he has been researching the computer science aspects of programming in a blockchain environment. He is fascinated by the interplay of mathematics, economics, technology, and human nature that is inherent in systems. He has worked for the Ethereum Foundation and the Swarm team, and is a co-author of the Colony whitepaper. He continues to be involved with DAOs in general and the Colony project in particular.

A full transcript of the episode can be found on our website: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/colony/

Key highlights:
Organizing is about distributing budget through reputation.
Time-based self-executing makes organizations have more bias towards action. 
New priorities: affordances make (human) capability building possible.
Contribution accounting and making “reputation as currencies”.
DAOs modules (decision making, consensus, and execution).
Entrepreneurial work can’t be commoditized.
Network effects lie in connecting practitioners.

To find out more about Aron and Jack’s work:
> Website: https://colony.io/
> Colony’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/joincolony

Other references and mentions:
> Collectively Intelligent Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/collectively-intelligent/id1577798978
> The EEEO Toolkit: https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/eeeo-toolkit/
> ShapeShift: https://shapeshift.com/
> COLONY Technical White Paper, 2020: https://colony.io/whitepaper.pdf

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio https://boundaryless.io/podcast-music

Recorded on 14 October 2021.

S3 Ep. 1 Aron Fischer and Jack du Rose – Colony: distributed organizations that actually work

Dark Matter Labs is a multidisciplinary design team developing new working methods for system change. Today we’re joined by Indy Johar and Annette Dhami to discuss their mission of discovering, designing and developing the institutional ‘dark matter’ that supports a more democratic, distributed and sustainable future.
 
Indy Johar is a founding Director of 00 and Dark Matter Labs. An architect by training, Indy is a Senior Innovation Associate with the Young Foundation and a visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield. He co-founded Impact Hub Birmingham and Open Systems Lab, and was a member of the RSA’s Inclusive Growth Commission. He is a thought leader in system change, the future of urban infrastructure finance, outcome-based investment, and the future of governance.
 
Annette Dhami spent over a decade building, operating and driving mission-led (and often place-based) organisations and networks, including Impact Hubs (Brixton and Islington) and the Plymouth Social Enterprise Network, exploring how we organise, finance, use buildings, build networks and create economies for shared benefit. Annette joined Dark Matter Labs in 2020 to focus more deeply on how we organise and operate (in theory and creating this in practice) for transition. She holds the organising and operational work of the international Dark Matter Labs ecosystem (read more about that here), and explores these organising questions more deeply in the multi-partner #BeyondtheRules project.
 
 
A full transcript of the episode can be found on our website: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/dark-matter-labs/
 
Key highlights:
We discussed:
Dark Matter Labs’ ambitions for creating a real learning organisation.
Governing by building learning capacity inside organisations.
The theory of genius to make people accountable through care and learning.
The ability to work diagonally across local and global dimensions.
Creating markets and new theories of value. 
The tension and spectrum between “patronising” governance and fostering autonomous (almost autocratic) entrepreneurialism.
Making space for care and innovation at every point in the system.
 
To find out more about Annette Dhami and Indy Johar’s work:
 
> Website: https://darkmatterlabs.org/ 
> Annette’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annette-dhami-1735554a/
> Indy’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indy-johar-b440b010/ 
 
Other references and mentions:

> DM Notes Series: https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/
> The Beyond The Rules project: https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/beyondtherules-e3ab44f0dc3 

> Organising #BeyondTheRules series:
https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/organising-beyondtherules-at-dark-matter-labs-e59e4f5dd32f 

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://boundaryless.io/podcast-music

Recorded on 26 October 2021.

S3 Ep. 2 Annette Dhami and Indy Johar – Dark Matter Labs: rethinking organizing #BeyondTheRules

Sean Ellis, famously known for coining the term “growth hacking”, who has led growth at multiple unicorn-scale companies like Dropbox, Eventbrite, and LogMeIn, joins us to open Season 7 of the podcast.
Reflecting on more than 15 years since the term first spread, he shares how growth hacking has evolved from a startup tactic into a discipline fit for today’s market.
Sean unpacks the shift from distribution-first strategies to product-led, product-focused ones, covers staged feature exposure, and finding north stars as teams within larger organisations.
In this episode, an opportunity to revisit the roots of growth hacking today, Sean, the best-selling author of Hacking Growth and host of the Breakout Growth podcast, explores how this is an era where product quality and market fit drive growth. Each feature, according to Sean, should be seen as a mini-product, refined until it becomes indispensable for users.. 
Tune in to learn how to build & scale in the world transformed by AI, as this one is not an episode to miss.

Key Highlights
👉 Experimentation helps distinguish between activities that are merely correlated with success and those that directly drive it.
👉 Product-market fit remains the most important driver of traction; without it, distribution alone won’t sustain growth.
👉 Growth is not about doing everything; it’s about doing the right things and measuring their impact.
👉 Startups can compete with incumbents if they solve unmet needs, even if their distribution is initially limited.
👉 When product-market fit is strong and distribution is optimised, growth can become exponential.
👉 Treat new features like standalone products - test, validate, and refine before broad promotion.
👉 Feature adoption reveals deeper insights: low use can indicate complexity, unclear value, or a misalignment with user needs.
👉 A/B testing should be focused on optimising feature presentation and accessibility, not compensating for poor product fit.
👉 Viewing your product as a platform lets each feature enhance the core experience, increasing retention and revenue.
 
Topics /chapters

(00:00) Growth Systems: reducing Friction to find Product Market Fit - Intro
(01:15) Introducing Sean Ellis
(08:21) Do small or big companies capture the market quicker?
(14:37) Reshaping Growth Strategies for B2C to B2B
(19:49) Marketing to Product: The Evolving Focus of Growth
(27:14) Creating a continuous feedback loop
(29:49) Growth in Larger Corporations through Organisational Design
(35:31) Top-Down vs. Collaborative: Driving Coherence in Growth Systems
(38:35) Product Market Fit as Paramount
(43:40) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions

Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/ellis-sean/

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music

#125 - Growth Systems: reducing Friction to find Product Market Fit - with Sean Ellis

Joining Erik on this episode are:

- Dan Hockenmaier (@danhockenmaier), founder of Basis One

- Casey Winters (@onecaseman), Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite

- Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan), former founder as well as former growth PM at Airbnb

They discuss:

- How marketplaces have evolved over the last several years.

- The trend towards owning more of a user’s experience, and the pros and cons of that approach.

- The possibilities for new vertical marketplaces.

- Where they would be investing if they were running a fund focused on the space.

- Why some of the biggest companies in the space were initially overlooked.

- How to think about building liquidity in a marketplace.

- Some of the interesting debates in the field, and their takes on them.

- The most surprising learnings they’ve had while working in the space.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. 

Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

All Things Marketplaces with Dan Hockenmaier, Casey Winters, and Lenny Rachitsky

In this episode we talk to Joost Minnaar, co-founder of the blog Corporate-Rebels.com in 2015. Joost travels the world researching progressive organisations, blogs about the discoveries he makes and advises on workplace issues. Joost is the co-author of the book 'Corporate Rebels, Make Work More Fun' (2020), winner of the Thinkers50 Radar Award (2019) and a Doctoral Candidate at the Amsterdam Business Research Institute (VU University, Amsterdam). We also have the pleasure to collaborate with Joost and his colleagues in our work on the Haier Group model (check up our upcoming webinar: https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/adopting-haier-model-webinar/). 

In our conversation with Joost, we get quite practical about the three “fundamental problems” of organising at scale, like he frames it, and how organisations tackle them. We loved how this episode helped us nail down some key thoughts into discernable patterns, drawing on Joost's rich library of experiences from researching so many great organisations.

Read our Medium publication to access our key insights and the interview transcript.

Here are some important links from the conversation:

Work by Joost and Corporate Rebels:

> Corporate Rebels Blog: https://corporate-rebels.com/

> Joost Minnaar on Twitter: https://twitter.com/joost_minnaar

>Joost Minnaar, Corporate Rebels, “Solving Organizational Complexity With Simplicity”:
https://corporate-rebels.com/how-fast-can-you-scale/

> Joost Minnaar, Corporate Rebels. “How To Organize A Large Company Without Middle Management”: https://corporate-rebels.com/how-to-organize-a-large-organization-without-middle-management/

> Pim de Morree, Corporate Rebels, “A Radical And Proven Approach To Self-Management” (Ner Group), https://corporate-rebels.com/ner-group

Other mentions and references

> Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies: https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582

> Geoffrey West profile https://www.santafe.edu/people/profile/geoffrey-west

> Principle of least action, http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Principle_of_least_action

> Deborah Frieze, From Scaling Up to Scaling Across: https://medium.com/in-praise-of-scaling-down/from-scaling-up-to-scaling-across-ed5092acd22f

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio find his portfolio here: https://audiojungle.net/user/liosound/portfolio?utf8=%E2%9C%93&order_by=sales

Recorded on May 4th 2020

Ep. 11 Joost Minnaar - Tackling the Fundamental Problems of Organising at Scale

In this episode, Simone Cicero is again joined by a special co-host and former guest on the podcast — Bill Fischer — Professor of Innovation Management at IMD Business School in Lausanne.

They talk to Martin Reeves, Managing Director in the San Francisco office of BCG and Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, BCG’s think tank on business strategy and co-author of the book “Your Strategy Needs a Strategy”. Martin is also currently leading research on the post-COVID era, winning the ’20s, competing on imagination, corporate vitality, purpose of purpose, strategy and artificial intelligence, competing on the rate of learning, diversity and performance, innovation strategy, organizational vitality and the humanity of corporations.

The conversation takes a deep dive into what it means for a business to become “ecosystemic” and compete in the 2020s, and about the bankruptcy of the current ways of doing “strategy” in a world in deep and continuous transformation. Martin also speaks widely about the renewed importance of imagination in organizations and about the need to compete on the rate of learning, combining human ingenuity with the power of machines and much more.


Read our story on Medium https://medium.com/@meedabyte/94f032785ab3 to access our key insights and the interview transcript for the episode.

Here are some important links from the conversation:

To find out more about Martin’s work

> https://twitter.com/MartinKReeves

> Your Strategy Needs a Strategy by Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha: https://www.bcg.com/publications/collections/your-strategy-needs-strategy/intro.aspx

References and mentions

> Martin Reeves, Fortune 50, October 2019. “How the Fortune Future 50 identifies companies with long-term growth potential”: https://fortune.com/2019/10/21/future-50-best-stocks-for-long-term-growth-2019/

> Martin Reeves, Ming Zeng and Amin Venjara, HBR, June 2015. “The Self-tuning enterprise”: https://hbr.org/2015/06/the-self-tuning-enterprise

> Adam M. Brandenburger, Barry J. Nalebuff, Co-Opetition: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385479506/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_cHC3Eb88TT1DN 

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on May 18th 2020

Ep. 13 Martin Reeves - Remaking the Case for Strategy in an Interdependent World

In this episode, we’re speaking to Nicolas Colin, co-founder & director of The Family, a pan-European investment firm founded in 2013 and headquartered in London. Nicolas publishes an extremely valuable newsletter European Straits about entrepreneurship, finance, strategy and policy, with a European perspective. He’s also the author of three books, one of which is Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age and member of the board of directors at Radio France, and a former commissioner at CNIL (the French personal data protection authority). Nicolas also contributes to several other outlets, such as co-host at Nouveau Départ with his wife Laetitia Vitaud (in French), and as a columnist at Sifted. 



In this conversation, we try to unpack why Nicolas thinks the current crisis is going to accelerate the transition to what he has recently called a more “mature entrepreneurial economy” and what he means with the Entrepreneurial Age is, a concept he uses to describe the networked computing-powered world where individuals - or users - are more important than having fixed assets on a balance sheet.  We also talk about the balance between building organizations based on attracting outsiders and the need to be resilient to sudden drops in users, which some tech companies seem to get wrong.



Remember that you can find the show notes and transcripts from all our episodes on our  Medium publication: https://medium.com/@meedabyte/718c066b19bc?source=friends_link&sk=5cfc8fe1a321d1bbc721c7f34b627eae

To find out more about Nicolas Colin’s work:

> Twitter: https://twitter.com/Nicolas_Colin

> Newsletter: https://europeanstraits.substack.com/

> Nicolas Colin (2018). Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age: https://www.amazon.com/Hedge-Greater-Safety-Net-Entrepreneurial/dp/1718917082



Other references and mentions:

> Structural Shifts podcast by Aperture, “Previewing the post-pandemic World”, with Nicolas Colin, Laetitia Vitaud and Ian Charles Stewart: https://medium.com/aperture-hub/previewing-the-post-pandemic-world-17-7be38279c2c7

> Babak Nivi coined the term “Entrepreneurial Age” (2013): https://venturehacks.com/the-entrepreneurial-age

> Carlota Perez’ work on technological revolutions: http://www.carlotaperez.org/

> Balaji Srinivasan On The Argument For Decentralization - Part 1, Pomp Podcast #295: https://youtu.be/SU6H-5kA0FA 

> Fernand Braudel, on Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, in 3 volumes: https://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Capitalism-15th-18th-Century-Vol/dp/0520081145:

> Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast

> Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on May 29th 2020

Ep. 15 Nicolas Colin - The Entrepreneurial Age: Networks and a fragmenting world

Boundaryless helps global customers with Business Strategy and Organization Design for the age of Ecosystems.
We do it by creating openly accessible frameworks and by supporting a community of organizations, institutions, and individuals through workshops, training, and consulting services. 

In this space we host all our audio recordings, including the Boundaryless Conversations podcast, a show focused on exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous. 

We used to be online at platformdesigntoolkit.com... now find us on our new website: www.boundaryless.io!

Email: hello@boundaryless.io

#125 - Growth Systems: reducing Friction to find Product Market Fit - with Sean Ellis

Boundaryless

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