Bo FreseMost people use AI backwards — asking it for answers instead of bringing it their ideas. The real unlock is using it as a thinking partner that challenges you.
Read35 years inside the machine
The product is the point.
Not the process. Not the methodology. Not the roadmap. The thing that ends up in the hands of real people, solving a real problem. That's the only measure that matters. Everything else is in service of that.
I diagnose what's actually blocking it — then stay and help you fix it.
How I work
The Treasure Map of Software Development
The same pattern. Every time.
The frameworks ran. The problems stayed.
Most software organisations are full of talented, hard-working people doing exactly what's expected of them.
And something still isn't right.
Products ship late, miss the mark for the people they were built for, or quietly accumulate technical debt that makes every future feature slower and more expensive. The business doesn't get the outcomes it was promised. The users don't get what they actually needed. You've probably tried to fix it. Hired people. Possibly run a transformation. The ceremonies ran. The status reports looked fine. The underlying problems stayed — and then surfaced somewhere else.
Here's why: good people, doing their best, inside a system they didn't design. What each person sees, reports, and acts on is shaped by where they sit and what they're measured by. By the time the picture reaches the top, it's passed through every lens in the organisation — each one honest, each one partial.
You can feel the gap. You can't see the source from where you stand.
I've spent 35 years at every level of that chain — developer to CTO, product to organisation. I understand what users need, what businesses are trying to achieve, and what it actually takes to build something that delivers both. I still write production code. That means I can sit with your developers and hear what they're not saying in the status meeting. I can read what your codebase says about the decisions that have been made. And I can have an honest conversation with the people who have the authority to act on what I find.
I work alongside your people until they own the solution. That's always the goal.
Your current organisation is perfectly built to create the results it gets now — problems included.
— Bo Frese
Right now, many of these conversations start with AI.
Taking full advantage of what AI can do requires the same things that have always mattered — business and development working together, faster iteration, and an organisation that can get out of its own way. None of those problems are new. AI raises the cost of not solving them.
The organisations that win with AI aren't the ones adopting it fastest. They're the ones removing the structural friction that's been slowing them down for years.
Featured article
AI Is About to Make Your Technical Debt Problem Much Worse
Most organisations already carry more technical debt than they can handle. AI is about to accelerate the problem significantly — unless you address the underlying quality culture first.
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Recent thinking
All articlesWhen I ask who owns whether the product is genuinely good, the answer is always some version of "everyone." Everyone means no one.
ReadThe ceremonies are happening. The Scrum Masters are trained. PI planning runs every quarter. And yet nothing has fundamentally changed.
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About Bo
The advisory and the technical.
Not separate jobs.
I've been building software since 1987. I still write production code. Most of the structural problems I diagnose originate from one assumption: that the advisory and the technical are different jobs, for different people, who don't really need to understand each other. That gap is where products fail.
I've been on both sides of it — at the same time — for decades. That's what makes it possible to see the whole chain, and say what's actually breaking it.