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High Tech Institute trainer Cees Michielsen highlights a handful of trends in the field of system requirements engineering. For High Tech Institute, he provides the 2-day training ‘System requirements engineering‘ several times a year.

 

Can we objectively say that a requirement is of good quality? What would be the measure for good? Is there something like ‘good enough’? Most of the answers to these questions can be found in the work of Philip Crosby, William Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran. These three quality gurus are no longer among us, but their ideas remain a great source of inspiration.

As requirements are the result of a requirements engineering process, it seems logical to check if a requirement meets the goals of the process. Firstly, the stakeholder needs have been established, and secondly, a correct and complete transition of the stakeholder needs is ensured up to the decomposition level where requirements can be implemented into hardware or software components. I will focus here on the second goal.

A distinction is made between intrinsic and extrinsic requirement quality. Intrinsic means that the requirement’s quality is determined by the way it’s documented or presented to the reader – the requirement’s syntax. This can be either purely textual or embellished with images, tables and more. The check can be done, in theory, by persons or applications lacking subject matter knowledge. They don’t need to understand what the requirement is about but rather see if it violates rules for writing requirements. Deming speaks of “pride of workmanship” and “well-crafted requirements.” In the course of the last 10-15 years, software tools to support these quality checks have become more and more advanced. In tools such as QVScribe, checklists like the Writing Requirements guideline of the International Council on Systems Engineering (Incose) are completely embedded and intrinsic quality checks are fully automated (including various requirements templates like EARS and IREB).

Note that the intrinsic quality only covers one-third of the total requirements quality. But the intrinsic quality checks do have value. If they’re carried out and corrections are made before the requirement is reviewed by subject matter experts and relevant stakeholders, these tools can save time and indeed be helpful to improve the quality of requirements.

But tools won’t help you determine if your requirement is meaningful to the intended audience. This is where the extrinsic quality of requirements comes in. It applies in two directions: back to the stakeholders who requested a specific feature of the product to be developed or a product characteristic or behavior (the source audience), and forward to the receivers of the requirement (the target audience).

Let’s consider the following requirement: “The responsiveness of the system shall be less than or equal to 0.5 ms.” This requirement will most likely pass the automated quality checks with flying colors. In practice, it’s often formulated as: “System responsiveness: ≤ 0.5 ms.” Would you say these requirements are of equal quality? From a syntactical perspective, the first will give a higher score as it contains a directive, but it isn’t until we ask the relevant stakeholders that we have some idea whether the intended meaning was translated correctly.

[Courseinstructor heading=”‘equirements engineers need to have their requirements checked and judged.'”

Quality is conformance to requirements, says Crosby. Did we, as requirements engineers or business analysts, correctly translate the stakeholder’s need into a system requirement? This can only be answered by the stakeholders who posed the original need. So requirements engineers need to have their requirements checked and judged – an activity that’s perceived as difficult.

Suppose the customer says that the engineer hasn’t understood the request? Or that he completely missed the point? Such feedback isn’t always pleasant and that causes a requirements engineer to avoid these confrontations. He often takes the safe route by contacting someone from the project to represent the customer or stakeholder.

That’s not a smart attitude. We want to make sure we’ve understood the stakeholder’s needs and translated them correctly and completely into requirements. Therefore, there’s no other way than to ask these difficult questions directly.

Quality is fitness for purpose, says Juran. Requirements must contain sufficient information and detail for designers to come up with solutions. The requirements are expected to be quantified to enable testers to verify and validate their successful implementation. In short, they must be clear, unambiguous, meaningful and have sufficient detail for those who receive the requirement as input for their work.

I’ve seen cases where no requirement documentation existed between an OEM and one of its component suppliers. Just a verbal agreement. Although this may seem an unacceptable situation in some cultures, the goals of the requirements engineering process were met. The supplier has been delivering the component with constant quality to the satisfaction of the customer for over twelve years now.

What would you do in situations like these? How do you see the quality of requirements in your company? How would you handle stakeholder needs like “I want the next version of the car to be more energy-efficient”? I’d be happy to hear from you, to learn and pass it on.

High Tech Institute trainer Cees Michielsen highlights a handful of trends in the field of system requirements engineering. For High Tech Institute, he provides the 2-day training ‘System requirements engineering‘ several times a year.

 

A question that pops up in almost all of my system requirements engineering classrooms is: how can we make sure that our requirements specification is complete? This is a valid question. Missing requirements usually means missing capabilities of the products we’re developing. It will have consequences for the success of those products. Either users of a product are disappointed because they expected something that’s not delivered or the product isn’t competitive enough compared to others with similar functionality.

 

Practice shows that requirements specifications are seldom complete. It’s just very difficult to make and keep them complete. Fortunately, over the past decades, we’ve learned some techniques and methods that can help us in our pursuit of completeness.

'Templates and checklists really work.'

First of all, templates and checklists really work. Originating from the early days of engineering, they help us not to forget the obvious requirements. Today, there’s help abound. The internet is littered with checklists especially focused on requirements.

 
You’ll also need to do some digging yourself: find all stakeholders with a potential impact on the product’s success. Forgetting stakeholders often means that you also won’t capture their needs and expectations of the product’s capabilities. That’s a recipe for failure. Of course, you’ll have to question and challenge your stakeholders to find out what their real needs are. It also helps to make these needs explicit. Don’t invite the fire brigade when you commission a newly-built tunnel just to find out that you may have missed some essential safety measures. You need to involve the firefighters in the early stages during requirements gathering.

 
Make sure to look at the product-to-be-built from different perspectives. View it through the eyes of actual users, owners and investors. Include stakeholders who also experience the negative effects. These perspectives are sometimes best described in a concept of operations, user stories, use cases and scenarios.

 
Realize that the requirements elicitation step (where you identify stakeholders and their needs) takes place at every decomposition level of your product architecture for every system element! At each level, you’ll find new stakeholders specific to that system element at that level. Think of software coding standards in a multidisciplinary product.

 
Analyze the needs in a structured manner. This means differentiating between the main function of a product and its subfunctions, between a function, its properties and its design constraints. In the end, you need to find a balance between performance and resource property requirements for functions.

 
If we take a passenger car as an example and say that “transporting people” is its main function, we need to express and quantify how well we need to transport people: how comfortable, how reliable, how many people, how safe? These are examples of performance properties (or qualities) of a function. They’re balanced with the resource properties, like: how much energy may this performance cost, how much material cost, how much noise? Whereas the analysis identifies the functions, properties and constraints, the requirements specification step quantifies the properties.

 
This is part of the structured requirements analysis method and is one of the effective ways to discover the so-called emerging properties – properties that weren’t requested by any stakeholder but represent a specific product aspect resulting from choices made in the design. For example, choosing a combustion engine gives noise and toxic gas emissions as emerging properties. Some of these emerging properties may suddenly become very important after having been disregarded for a long time, as we’ve seen for NOx emission. Point is that once a design choice has been made, you should look at the consequences (good, bad and ugly) to see if new requirements should be created to manage the emerging properties.

 
Over the years, the names of the product development departments have changed quite a bit, especially the groups responsible for writing the requirements at the product (or system) level. From product definition, via systems engineering, we now see groups (sometimes departments) named in such a way that it’s very clear what they stand for, like “Product Properties and Customer Functions.” Similarly, the title of Porsche’s Hansjörg Maier says it all: “Leiter Produkt-Eigenschaften und Kunden-Funktionen.” This gives a tremendous focus on what’s key for the product, both its functionality and its properties, and what makes the product stand out from the competition.

As a technical leader, you need to steer both the project and the company in the right direction. To do that, you must be able to convince stakeholders, influence without authority and exhibit personal leadership.

What would you say to improve the situation and cooperation? Take a look at 5 different situations and tell us how you would respond. You will get personal feedback from trainer Jaco Friedrich and you might win a Tiny Tony’s distribution box.

 

One of the largest frustrations of startups trying to work with big enterprises is the enormous amount of false positives. Many startup founders have fallen into the trap of getting promising feedback from individuals from large companies and believe that they’re close to getting a deal in place. This positive feedback may continue for a long time, but the actual contract never materializes. There are many reasons why this happens, not the least that orchestrating an actual contract with an outside party is quite an uphill battle in many companies, but it’s a good reminder to make sure that, as a startup founder, you don’t allow your team to chase ghosts.

With some of the researchers I worked with I’ve experienced something similar. Some research results received enormous interest from companies, large and small, on industrial conferences to the point that we had hundreds of people in presentations and tons of positive feedback. When we then decided to commercialize the technology, the initial interest vaporized quickly and it turned out that although people were interested in the idea behind the technology, there was no willingness to actually buy the solution.

One major factor in all this is the notion of socially desirable behavior. When a startup founder talks to a potential customer, this customer tends to provide feedback along the lines of what the founder would like to hear. This is normal human behavior and one of the reasons why societies work well. If we always told everyone we meet exactly what we thought of them, there would be significantly higher levels of conflict and strife in the world. As a founder, though, you need to be cognizant of this and seek to ask questions that minimize the need for others to tell you what they think you’d like to hear.

Within the startup space, there tend to be two schools of thought. The first group is looking to get people to use their offering and to get to a large user base before thinking about monetizing. This group has a point in that you’re looking to minimize friction for adopting the offering, and paying for something that you don’t even know will help you is a significant hurdle for most. Also, if the offering is monetized indirectly, eg through advertising, in-app purchasing or freemium, the focus on growing the user base may well be the best way forward. The challenge is then often to fund the business until the monetization part starts to work.

The second group believes that buying intent and willingness to pay is an integral part of the validation of an innovative offering. That means that during the first stages of even talking to customers about the offering that you haven’t even built yet, you explicitly bring up price and payment terms to get feedback on that, too. Of course, what customers say can very well be, and often is, different from what they do, but their verbal feedback is at least an early signal. When there’s enough positive feedback and you decide to build an MVP, it’s then possible to test customers’ willingness to actually buy the service by offering the MVP for a fee.

Typically, I recommend the startups I work with to focus on the second model, ie verify buying intent as early as possible and, where feasible, based on actual customer behavior. Especially with novel business models in established markets, this may not be the right answer, though. Several startups are exploring models where customers pay with their data. That’s fine, but it does require that you have a solid hypothesis on how you can use that data to monetize elsewhere. And, in general, the more complicated the business model and the larger the number of stakeholders, the harder it will be to build a viable business as more things can go wrong and more hypotheses about your business need to be true.

In the end, we all have limited resources and the goal for any startup should be to test the underlying hypotheses of the business as early and as cheaply as possible to minimize wasting time and money on things that don’t pan out. Killing an idea and pulling the plug is incredibly hard and figuring out when to do so is even harder, but the risk is that you keep wasting resources on a business that isn’t going anywhere. The opportunity cost of that can be enormous as it keeps you from moving on to a next business or pivot that turns out to be more promising.

For a variety of reasons, interest from potential customers is far from the same as buying intent. As an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur, confirming willingness to pay by the stakeholder group that you’re looking to monetize, ie the customer, is critical and generally best done as early as possible. This is advice that’s easily complicated by all kinds of realities surrounding the business, ranging from slow-moving B2B sales cycles to multi-sided markets, but ignoring the reality of a for-profit enterprise (that you need to make money to create a profit) is a surefire way to fail. As the famous business professor, Peter Drucker, said: the purpose of a business is to create a customer!

Entrepreneurs are, by definition, irrational optimists who have strong confidence in what they’re pursuing. Even if all of us can have bouts of doubt, entrepreneurs are managing these doubts and focus on executing on their convictions. The risk, however, is that you start to believe in your own convictions so hard that you fail to be responsive to outside input.

One of the hardest challenges in startups is the balance between building based on your conviction on what the world needs or is going to need and incorporating feedback from customers and the market. Only listening to what customers say will result in too small a delta compared to existing products. And if you don’t offer a 10x improvement in some dimension, there typically is too little incentive for potential customers to go through the pain of switching from whatever they’re using today.

On the other hand, ignoring input from the market and blindly building what you believe is needed is a sure way to fail. People aren’t going to buy from you because of the compelling story you tell. They only buy from you because your offering provides some significant benefit over alternative solutions. Entrepreneurs are by necessity rule breakers and, by and large, tend to ignore market input longer than what’s good for the business.

A complicating factor is that many startups aim to exploit some technology, standard, trend or regulation that has the potential to disrupt an existing business ecosystem. The disruption is often in the early stages, as others will already have jumped on the opportunity, and the startup is basically betting the farm on hitting the market with a sufficiently compelling offering right when the disruption is gaining momentum. That means that collecting relevant feedback from the market is impossible as there is no market yet.

This explains why, according to some research, the primary success factor of startups is timing: being at the right place at the right time. Not very satisfactory for people who try to develop predictable and repeatable patterns for startup formation but a reality that we all have to contend with. Whenever I ask entrepreneurs why some idea or startup failed, in a significant number of cases it’s some event or development completely outside the scope of the startup’s control that knocked the whole company off course.

In my experience, though, the common factor in all companies I was involved in that didn’t do so well is lack of sales. Sales cures all ails, the saying goes, and it really is the case. As Peter Drucker famously said, the purpose of a company is to create a customer. Failure to do so can of course lie in an insufficiently compelling offering, but as often, it’s failing to find the right customer for what you have to offer. The idea that many engineers have, ie that a good product sells itself, isn’t true at all and most certainly false for startups.

My main learning in this context is to make happy customers. Many companies fall into the trap of making customers happy. There’s an important distinction. In the latter case, you focus on the customers you have and try to make them happy. The problem is that your initial customers may not at all be the right ones. For instance, one company I worked with managed to secure a few very large customers who were then continuing to demand such amounts of dedicated attention that this consumed all R&D resources. As a consequence, the company was unable to expand to new clientele but had grown dependent on the revenue these few large customers brought in.

Making happy customers starts with defining the profile of your ideal customer. You then continue to sell to the potential customers fitting your profile. Any customer who, over time, proves to not be the right match for you, you may decide to fire. Or, at least, you don’t give in to requests that deviate you from the customer profile you’re looking to serve.

Being clear on the customer profile you’re looking to serve also helps in aiming to time a market disruption. Although most consider a disruption to be instantaneous, for those on the inside it’s clear that it’s a slow process with a few companies getting into the transition early and the majority following at a later point in time. Finding these early movers, making them your customers and then together with them experimenting your way through the disruption is one of the safest ways forward for a startup; it gives early feedback on the suitability of your offering and gets you ready for when the tornado hits, as Geoffrey Moore calls it.

Startups need to carefully balance a solid belief and confidence in the core idea behind the company and incorporating feedback from the market. Straying too far to either side is a recipe for failure. The best approach is to “make happy customers” rather than making customers happy. That allows you to find those early adopters and work with them. It still leaves you with the challenge of scaling to serve the larger market, but that’s a concern for a later time. If you don’t survive now, you’ll never have the challenge of scaling, so why bother worrying about that now?

 

My grandparents from my maternal side were farmers and had cows. Their mature milking cows were put in fields with lots of lush grass and could eat what they wanted. The young cows that hadn’t yet been bred were put in the fields that had already been cleaned out by the milking cows or on poor pastures. My initial belief was that this was a cost-saving measure as the young cows didn’t give milk yet, but that was wrong. The real reason was that feeding young cows just enough so that they don’t go hungry but stay lean causes them to become bigger cows when they grow up, with a stronger frame and better milk production.

The funny thing is that the same is true for startups. In my experience, having too much funding during the early stages of a startup is counterproductive and may well cause the venture to fail. Most founders I talk to about this shake their heads in disbelief as they feel they’re constantly scraping by, closing deals by bending over backward for customers and permanently walking around with a feeling that they’re deviating from the company’s original mission.

Also the fear of running out of money and disappointing the friends and family who invested their hard-earned savings as well as the employees who are depending on you for their paycheck is real and results in existential angst in anyone with a bone of empathy in their body. Nobody wants to be a failure and for all the noise of the “celebrate your failures” movement, everyone I know prefers to celebrate other people’s failures.

The point is, however, that in all your jockeying for closing deals with customers, being responsive to their needs and wishes, adjusting your vision to the feedback you’re receiving, you’re navigating the design space of your offering and gradually nailing the content and functionality you need to have to build a successful company.

There’s a time when startups really benefit from large amounts of funding, which is after they’ve nailed the offering to the market and the investment goes to executing a scaling strategy that allows for regional expansion as well as expansion to serve multiple industries. However, this should happen after you’ve nailed the offering and you have the revenue to prove it.

In the end, the balance for investors is to give startups enough funding so that they don’t have to raise money all the time and the founders can focus on building the business. And, at the same time, not so much that the company stops feeling the dread of possible extinction (staring into the abyss, as Elon Musk calls it), which causes the focus on adjusting yourself to customer needs rather than a fictive, unconfirmed belief about the market. As a founder, most of what you believe about your market, customers and offering is wrong, but you don’t know which part. Constant interaction with the market causes you to kill your darlings to get to a viable product and company that manages to become cash flow positive and, preferably, grow like a weed once you’ve nailed it. But for that, you need to stay lean, just like my grandparents’ cows.

The high-tech industry is extremely innovative. Design thinking is an effective method to innovate effectively and even faster, says Rex Bierlaagh, trainer of ‘Innovation with design thinking‘.

Want to increase innovation power and entrepreneurial behavior in your organization? Take our quiz to check your knowledge and receive tips to (further) improve your skills.

 

Over thirty years ago, I started my first company. Since then, I’ve started more companies, acted as an angel investor in more than ten ventures and as a board member or advisor in several others, and interacted with numerous founders and entrepreneurs. In addition, I’ve collaborated with intrapreneurs inside large organizations trying to get innovations off the ground and commercialized, both while working inside those organizations as well as through consulting arrangements.

Over these years, I’ve collected several experiences and learnings that I feel might be worth sharing. Some might be counterintuitive and some might be obvious, but either way, I’ve been surprised how often people know one thing and do the other. In the coming weeks, we’ll be diving into ten lessons I learned the hard way, meaning that I lost money, time or both. Of course, there’s no better way to internalize a lesson than through personal (negative) experience. Still, quoting Elon Musk, starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss, and it’s much better to learn what you can from others and make your own, novel mistakes instead of repeating old ones. So, here goes…

1. Too much early funding kills a startup

Most startups that I work with love the idea of not having to worry about funding for a good long while. However, I have some examples that show that too much funding causes a company to focus internally, build products based on the opinions of the founders and staff and ignore customer input. By being budget constrained all the time, the focus is on generating revenue, which automatically causes everyone to focus on building what customers are willing to pay for.

2. Build it and they’ll come is setting yourself up to fail

One of the hardest challenges in startups is the balance between building based on your conviction on what the world needs or is going to need and feedback from customers and the market. Only listening to what customers say will result in too small a delta compared to already existing products. However, ignoring input from the market and blindly building what you believe is needed is a sure way to fail. Entrepreneurs are by necessity rule breakers and tend to ignore the market input longer than what’s good for the business.

3. Customer interest is no evidence of buying intent

One of the most painful lessons I’ve learned the hard way is that ideas and research that were presented to potential customers with great and positive feedback didn’t convert well at all when turned into a commercial offering. I have cases where hundreds of people were interested in research results and we completely failed to build a cash-flow positive business around the commercial offering based on the research.

4. The leadership team almost always is the bottleneck for growth

Once a company gets off the ground, there seems to be a number of points, in terms of company size, where growth stalls. In many cases, the reason for this is that the leadership team isn’t effectively restructuring the roles, responsibilities and authority in the organization. Often, the founders have a high need for control and don’t dare to properly delegate and, by extension, become the bottleneck for growth.

5. The offering’s pricing is wrong

Few topics lead to such heated debates in startups as the pricing of the offering. The fallacy many fall into is that we need to get the pricing right from the beginning as we can’t change it once we’ve established the anchor point in the market. In practice, however, pricing needs significant experimentation with customers, meaning that you need to develop mechanisms to experiment without burning bridges.

6. Inbound sales is an illusion

The holy grail of sales is to create a lot of noise on social media and to see a slew of customers knocking on your door, desperate to buy what you’re selling. Several of the startups I work with start with the ambition to use that model. In my experience, until you have a valuation exceeding a billion or more, the best way to generate sales, especially in B2B contexts, is to simply scout for potential customers, fill the pipeline, start taking prospects through the funnel and get them to sign on the dotted line. Despite having started my life as an engineer, I can’t stress enough how hard sales is and how much work it is to work the funnel and to close deals.

7. Solving ‘your part’ only is causing you to fail

Many of the entrepreneurs I work with, especially intrapreneurs, have experience in the industry they’re looking to disrupt. Mature industries tend to be horizontalized and each company fills a specific role and position in the business ecosystem. When starting a new company, many want to focus their energy on precisely their core area of expertise, expecting the remainder of the offering to the end-customer to be built by others. The challenge is that for new, innovative offerings, there are no ‘others,’ meaning that you need to take much more responsibility for the end-to-end, vertical integration of the offering to customers.

8. Consulting to bootstrap slows you down immensely

Even if raising funding can be quite addictive, many entrepreneurs are looking to maintain as much ownership of the company as possible. One strategy is to bootstrap the business by complementing the product work with consulting to pay the bills. This is a perfectly viable strategy, as long as you realize how much things get slowed down by having fewer resources and splitting attention between two fundamentally different types of businesses. Also, there’s a significant chance that the certainty of consulting income is far more comfortable than the glass-eating risk that comes with building a product company, causing the product side to atrophy and disappear over time.

9. Two-sides markets are uphill battles until you win

Every company wants to be a platform business connecting multiple groups of stakeholders and levying a tax on the value created in the ecosystem enabled by the platform. Once you’ve established that position, it’s one of the best places to be as a company. However, getting there is really, really hard and it takes an amazing amount of time – if you even get there at all. The only approach I’ve seen work in this context is to first build a viable business with one stakeholder group and only after you’ve established some modicum of success, start to open up to other stakeholder groups to platformize the business.

10. It will take twice as long – if you’re lucky

Everyone, including myself, and perhaps excepting seasoned serial entrepreneurs, underestimates how long it takes to grow a business. The media often presents successful startups as overnight successes, but the reality is that these overnight successes have been quite long in the making. For instance, those working with mechanical systems may know WD-40 as a product to help, eg loosening bolts. What many don’t know is that WD-40 was the 40th try of the company to build a successful product. Similarly, Rovio, the company behind the Angry Birds game, had built 51 failed games before the ‘overnight’ success. For all the gung-ho attitude many associate with a startup, it’s more of a marathon than a sprint.

Starting new ventures, either as an independent startup or in the context of a larger, established, organization is hard. To increase the likelihood of success, it’s helpful to start with the right mindset and set of beliefs. As the saying goes, a smart person learns from his or her own mistakes, a wise person learns from other people’s mistakes. I hope that you, as a wise person, can benefit from my learnings over the last decades. Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once!

Humans are habit-driven creatures. Some research suggests that up to 95 percent of the day, the average human is purely on auto-pilot, executing according to the habits that have been built up over the years. Habits have many advantages, including not needing willpower to execute them, but of course, there are risks. The primary risk is that one easily gets stuck in operating in an activity-driven way rather than an outcome-focused way.

Once you’ve clarified your purpose (rule 1), the next step is to concretize this purpose in tangible, concrete and measurable outcomes. Failing to do so often leads to a major gap between what you say you do and what you actually do. An illustrative example is often found in startups. Every startup wants to grow its business, but translating that ambition into actual outcomes requires setting specific targets. Yesterday, I talked to a startup where the co-founder responsible for sales had a very concrete goal for the year: go from the current 4 paying customers to 26. You may debate if 26 is the right number, but it for sure is concrete and specific.

Translating your purpose into concrete, tangible and measurable outcomes allows you to evaluate whether your actions and tactics are having the desired effect. For example, most companies want to shorten the time to market for new functionality. Specifically for functionality realized in software, doing more frequent updates in the field is obviously the way to go. Transitioning from yearly to quarterly releases, however, also means that release testing, updating documentation and all other activities related to a release have to be performed four times as often. Initially, many companies look to maintain the same, frequently manual, processes. Soon, however, it becomes clear that simply executing these processes faster won’t result in the desired outcome as the overhead is too high, people complain about the repetitive nature of the work, and so on.

When it turns out that the desired outcomes aren’t realized, the next step is to change your tactics. In our example, this means automating much of the work that’s now being conducted manually, so incorporating continuous integration and testing to increase the quality of the software well before the point where a release is scheduled. There are also tools for automatically generating necessary configurations of software, documentation, test case selections, and so on, that further limit the manual effort required to allow for more frequent releases.

If only a high-level intent had been expressed of shorting the time to market for new functionality, it wouldn’t have become clear that the current processes are insufficient. Instead, everyone would have complained about the difficulty of accomplishing things and the ways of working wouldn’t have changed.

One challenge I wrote about earlier is that we generally don’t control the outcomes of our actions. However, we can influence the outcome while allowing for other factors on which we have no influence. This means that when our actions and tactics aren’t resulting in the outcomes we hoped for, we need to assess whether this is caused by factors outside our control or our actions. For example, in stock market investing, poor returns can be the result of our selection of stocks and funds or due to a general bear market. The answer to this question can be easily answered by comparing your returns to a stock market index, such as the MSCI world index. If you’re doing worse than the index, it’s because of you. If not, it’s factors outside your control.

Translating a qualitatively defined purpose into quantitative outcomes is far from trivial. One of the challenges is that the defined outcomes often feel like approximations rather than accurate incarnations of your purpose. Here, the general advice is to follow the “perfect is the enemy of good” approach and allow yourself to start with some imperfect metrics. Once you’ve used these for a while, you start to learn where these work and don’t work. Following an iterative process, you can then, over time, come up with a better set of outcome definitions. Until, of course, you feel the need to redefine or adjust your expressed purpose.

I’m certainly not the first one to talk about these topics and several approaches exist for companies and individuals to use, including Hoshin Kanri and the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) model. The challenge, however, isn’t to pick the perfect system to follow but rather to sit down and translate your purpose into quantitative targets. For example, the Software Center for which I have the privilege to act as its director has the ambition to grow in size and impact. For 2021, the quantitative outcomes we’re looking to accomplish include adding two new partner companies and to double the number of social media connections we have on Linkedin, Youtube and Twitter.

Defining a purpose without connecting concrete, tangible, quantitative outcomes to it easily becomes aspirational without actual progress. Many have ambitions along the lines of exercising more, losing weight, eating better, and so on, without ever doing something about it and, consequently, never achieving the goal. Having clarified your purpose (rule 1) without clearly specifying the outcomes (rule 2) results in the same situation. Define a set of outcomes and, even if you’re far from satisfied with them, execute and iterate to improve over time. If done right, you’ll realize that you’re acting more and more in line with what you want your life to mean. Why settle for less?

One of the wonderful aspects of western society is that if you’re willing to work and have acquired a decent set of relevant skills, you can always find a way to make a living. I’m sure that there are exceptions, but I believe that, by and large, this actually is the case for many of us. Once you get to that point, the question becomes what you want to work on. What’s the work that feels worthwhile to spend your life energy on?

There are many answers in our culture, including making a ton of money, having a career that leaves others in awe or finding ways to get into the public eye so that you can build a reputation. Others view work as a necessary evil that we should spend as little time on as possible. Instead, we should look for ways to minimize the time allocated to work and spend time on other activities, which may include recreation or volunteering.

During most of the bigger vacations, such as summer and around Christmas, I often meet people who are incredibly happy to be away from work for a while. When you probe a little, the way many talk about their job, colleagues and responsibilities isn’t very positive. The vacation is viewed as an escape from the “living hell,” as someone called it, or the “prison” that I heard others refer to. I often wonder why one would stay in a position that one clearly hates or isn’t satisfied with. Why not choose a life that you don’t want to escape from?

That brings me to the first rule for thriving in a digital world: clarify your purpose. We’re all driven by a set of extrinsic and a set of intrinsic motivators. The extrinsic motivators are those that give some form of external reward, ie a form of reward-driven behavior. Your intrinsic motivation comes purely from within and doesn’t expect an external reward. Conducting the work brings its own reward because it aligns with your values, your purpose and what you experience as meaningful.

After I left academia to spend close to a decade in industry, in several vice-president level roles, I worked more hours than I had ever done in my life before that. Nonetheless, I couldn’t stop writing research articles. I kept at it during late evenings, weekends and vacations and even though my productivity dropped dramatically from when I was in academia, I still managed to publish 4-6 papers per year. I realized that writing research papers is my way of making sense of complex, chaotic topics and I relish the intrinsic reward of creating models or frameworks that help me understand and create order in the chaos. One of my intrinsic motivations is to use research to create novel insights and share those with others.

From this experience, I learned that I was unable to clarify my purpose and intrinsic motivation by sitting in an ivory tower and reasoning through things. I had to actively experiment with different roles, activities and contexts to experience what works for me and gives me energy and what works less well and drains the life out of me. Some people figure out early in life what they want to focus their life on, but many are less clear. My advice to those is to experiment more. You can’t figure out what your purpose is by sitting in a chair and thinking. You have to go out there and do stuff. As Steve Jobs said in the closing of his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford: stay hungry; stay foolish.

The reason why I believe that clarifying your purpose is so important in a digital world is threefold. First, the competition is, in many ways, much tougher as we’re all connected in a global network. Rather than competing with the others in your village, town or city, you’re now competing at a world level. As the saying goes, if you’re one in a million in China (or India, for that matter), there are still a thousand people just as good as you. To be successful, you need to operate at the top of your abilities. And you won’t be able to do that unless you’re completely aligned towards the work. That only happens if you’re intrinsically motivated and 100 percent in the game, which requires alignment with your purpose.

Second, digitalization allows for the automation of not just blue-collar work but even more so of white-collar work. ML/DL models are already better at diagnosing medical images than radiologists. NLP algorithms are better at scanning documents than lawyers. Autonomous-drive algorithms already are better than most drivers in all but a very small set of situations and soon will surpass humans in all contexts. The consequence is that every job or task that’s repetitive and can be described in a process will be automated. The repetition allows for the generation of data that ML/DL models need for training and the process will give a basic structure for algorithms to operate in. To stay relevant, you need to put your energy into the tasks that require all of your human skills and abilities.

The third reason is concerned with self-actualization. Maslov’s pyramid is a well-known framework for reasoning about this and once the basics are in place, which is the case for most of us, the focus is and should be on growing as a human being and as a professional into your full potential. Anything less than that is a waste of human life energy. That requires you to understand in which directions you’d like to grow and then take ownership of that journey and not allow excuses, such as blaming others, to get in the way.

I believe that all of us have come into this life to accomplish something. Something that will leave the world in a better place after you shuffle off this mortal coil. Everyone I meet wants their life to have meant something. For all but the lucky few, however, we don’t wake up one morning with a completely clear understanding of our purpose. It requires active exploration and, at some point, choosing a purpose that, based on your best understanding of your intrinsic motivators and what you experience as meaningful, is your best approximation. That purpose might change over time, but at least, for a while, you have a north star to sail by.

My professional purpose in life is to help accelerate the adoption of digital technologies in the software-intensive industry. I believe that technology, by and large, is a force for good in the world and solely responsible for the amazing progress that humanity has made over the last century or more. At this point in time, digital technologies are the most important technologies as they hold so much unexploited potential. For all the criticism of large corporations, it’s companies that bring technologies to market and through that create the associated societal benefits. So, where I can help accelerate the introduction of new technologies into our society by industry, I help improve the quality of life for humankind and help reduce unnecessary human suffering. And this professional purpose is why I chose to run Software Center, why I’m on the board of several companies and why I invest in startups. To the best of my understanding, at this moment, this is the best use of my time and energy.

I realize that some or even many may completely disagree, but it was never the intention to convince you of my purpose. The goal is to convince me of my purpose and it works for me to guide my actions and how I allocate my time. And, believe me, coming to this point and being able to clarify my purpose to myself took me many, many years.

My challenge to you is to clarify the purpose you choose for your life. What actions are you taking to that end? And if you even have the slightest spiritual side to you, what’s the reason that you’re here, in this life, and are you living up to that purpose? In a world where the opportunities are seemingly infinite, you need direction to ensure that you’re using your time and energy in the best way possible so that when you come to the end of your life, you can be satisfied with how you’ve used that amazing gift of life. As Robert Byrne famously said: the purpose of life is to live a life of purpose.