Pygrunn: team alignment, enterprise design power - Edzo A. Botjes¶

Tags: pygrunn, python

(One of my summaries of the 2025 pygrunn conference in Groningen, NL).

He helps startups to design their business. He’s got more info at https://www.edzob.com/page/enterprise/ , an “enterprise design cheat sheet”. He was a consultant for a long time and started noticing patterns. He’s now in education/research and he’s focused on culture.

According to Osterwalder, success = value proposition + uniqueness + business model + timing + team alignment. In Edzo’s experience, the team alignment is often a core problem.

As a person, you have a skill set (behaviour and capabilities). As a team, you have a collective toolset: (structure, processes, data and tech). Those two are the tangible stuff. Intangible is your mindset (attitude and motivation) as a person, and the culture as a team.

UX is a social contract between an app and the user. There’s a social contract behind the interactions within the company. A culture. How do you want to collaborate? How you collaborate defines what you’re going to be building. Conway’s law. (He mentioned his talk of last year about this subject).

His wife did a PhD about the meaning behind fairy tales. For him, as a technical person, the idea of having multiple meanings of the same physical text was initially hard. What do words mean? What is their purpose? Having good conversations about the terms and words used in, for instance, your business model/motivition canvas is a good idea. Communication is key.

There was a lot more in his presentation, as it was intended as a fast-paced talk. Lots of way to look at your business or product. But in the end, team alignment could well be key. Optimizing your team members. Organizing them well. Collaboration? Facilitating? Key: have conversations. “Invest in beer and bitterballen, not in courses”.

And: you should always be looking at what can I destroy. What in your company can be stopped, removed, destroyed? You need that to change and improve.

His slides are online with lots of extra links and background information.

Photo explanation: picture from our Harz (DE) holiday in 2023