Back in the day, life was good for software companies.
Developers were hard to find, demand was high, and if you knew how to hire good people, you had a business. Sometimes you built products in-house, sometimes you sold expertise to clients. Your value proposition was risk mitigation in case of overtire. The model wasn’t particularly complicated.
The skills required were a programming language, a framework or two, and a handful of design patterns. Compiling customer requirements into code. Assembling components into systems.
And then the world changed.
Large language models know programming languages and understand frameworks. They speak human and binary. Give them enough structure and they write code, tests, documentation and deployment scripts before you’ve finished your second coffee.
Programming Wizards, who once turned natural language into code spells, are no longer the bottleneck.
A new kind of sorcerer is needed. The kind that can turn software into gold.
Today, the virtual world is your oyster. A capable engineer working alongside modern tools can produce high-quality software in a very short time.
The question is no longer „How do we build?” The question is „What?”
Furthermore, „How do we monetise it?”
Data has become today’s raw material. Unlike rare earth minerals, it doesn’t become scarcer. Everyday, we produce more of it.
We have more data than ever before, more technological capability than ever before, and more options for what we could do with it.
Yet many companies seem less certain about the future.
Many business know they need AI or they will fall behind. The problem is, this often appears to be the only thing they know for sure.
Everyone is afraid.
Employees are trying to make themselves indispensable so they don’t lose their jobs. Leaders are searching for efficiencies.
Everyone wants to know how much AI can help us save.
A more interesting question is: How do we grow with AI?
For software companies, the challenge is particularly big. How do we remain relevant when building software is no longer the hardest part? How do we become trusted partners who actively help customers solve business problems instead of merely executing requests?
We need a strategy.
A genuine point of view about who we want to be and where we want to go.
Here are some thoughts how you can arrive at what differentiates you on the market.
Speak with your customers. Understanding what they struggle with and where they spend money has always been a surprisingly effective way of finding opportunities.
Talk to your people. Many software companies have operated for years like acting agencies. Their engineers could play any role, learn any technology, build any application. But who do you actually have on board? What expertise have they accumulated? What domains do they understand? What problems do they care about solving?
And be on top of market trends, just remember, it is a little like crystal ball gazing.
The sooner you decide what to focus on, the more of a head start you gain. If you can’t decide, experiment. Fail fast, learn, pivot and repeat.
Just don’t cut corners. In uncertain times, minimise waste. Why are you running this experiment? What is your hypothesis? What defines success and when do you stop and leverage what you’ve learned?
Be patient. Things will almost certainly take longer than you expect. Invest in competence. Learn your tools. Learn your market. Understand your customers. Then understand them again because you’re probably still missing something.
And be realistic. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Transformations require effort and investment. You might need to requalify people. You might need to let some people go. You will almost certainly need to abandon ideas, habits and ways of working that made perfect sense in the old world.
So equip yourself with stress relievers and healthy venting mechanisms. Invest in teams, communities and relationships. Talk about where you’re going and why it matters.
And most importantly, believe in your vision.
If you can’t speak passionately about what your company is becoming, why would anyone else believe it is worth joining you on the journey?