Bo Frese

35 years inside the machine

The product is the point.

I help organisations build better products — and fix what's in the way.

How I work
The Treasure Map of Software Development

The Treasure Map of Software Development

The same pattern. Every time.

Everybody doing their job. Nobody looking at the whole.

Most software organisations are full of talented, hard-working people. The developers care about the code. The product managers care about the roadmap. The architects care about the system. Leadership cares about delivery.

And yet — products ship late, miss the mark, or quietly accumulate the kind of technical debt that makes every future feature slower and more expensive than the last. Not because of bad intentions. Because nobody is looking at the whole chain.

The people who understand what users need can't talk effectively to the people who build the product. The people who build it don't have the full picture of why. Decisions get made in silos, each one locally reasonable, collectively damaging. The organisation is optimised for process, not for the product it's supposed to be delivering.

The current organisation is perfectly built to create the results it gets now — problems included.

— Bo Frese

Recent thinking

All articles

May 2025

I Don't Care What You Call It

Product development comes down to two things. I've known this for 35 years. So have you. The problem is everything we build around those two things.

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Bo Frese

About Bo

35 years inside software development.
Still building today.

I come in, I listen, I diagnose. I talk to the people closest to the product — managers, architects, developers, testers — and I look for what's underneath the symptoms. Then I tell you what I found, honestly, including the parts that are uncomfortable.

I've seen what right looks like from inside a small team. I've seen what wrong looks like at scale. The gap between the two is what I diagnose.

Full background

If this sounds familiar

If your organisation is struggling to build products the way you know it should be able to — and you suspect the real problem is somewhere you haven't looked yet — I'd like to hear about it.