Wednesday, May 7, 2025    Conference Day 2

Shorten Time-to-Market

Welcome back

Christer Lundh, Conference Co-chair, LPPDE

Christer Lundh opens the second day with reflections on the learnings from the first day. As
always on a Lean Project and Process Development Exchange event the learning and
knowledge exchange is central. Christer will share his learnings and let the knowledge sink in
through a reflection before presenting the first speaker.

Decide to Move: How Finding Missing Decisions and Making the Call Faster Unlocks Progress

Amer Catic, CEO at Yolean

Projects often stall—not because people aren’t working hard, but because the decisions that matter most haven’t been identified yet. In this talk, you’ll learn a practical method to uncover the critical decisions your team doesn't even know it’s missing. These hidden decisions are often the silent roadblocks to progress, creating delays, confusion, and unnecessary rework. But the power of this approach doesn’t stop at discovery. You’ll also see how to accelerate the process of making the call—cutting through ambiguity, aligning the right people, and reducing the lead time to action. Backed by key data and metrics from hundreds of real-world design projects in construction, this talk blends actionable insight with evidence. Whether you’re leading complex projects or trying to get your team unstuck, this method will help you shift from reactive problem-solving to proactive momentum. Decide to move—and help your team do the same.

Amer Catic is passionate about effectivity! His specialties are in visual management and knowledge management, and he applies those tools through Yolean (www.yolean.com) to achieve goals of lean and agility in teamwork. Amer is happy to share knowledge whenever it can make a difference and he equally enjoy moderating, presenting and listening. Let's connect!

Amer is a lecturer in Knowledge Management at Chalmers University and HSN Kongsberg Norway. He is also a Guest lecturer in Digital Transformation IHM Business School. He has been an invited speaker in lean, project management and knowledge management at several events and conferences, eg. Lean Product and Process Development, Lean Enterprise Institute USA, Lean Forum Sverige, Logistikföreningen Plan and Energy Valley Norge.

For several years, he has supported AB Volvo as a trainer in knowledge management and A3 problem solving.

Be the Change You Want to See

Ulrika Thell, Enterprise Coach - Leadership & Culture

The presentation focuses on how you can increase flexibility and that way gain speed.

To handle the challenges that we face in a more and more complex environment, we tend to focus on what is tangible. We upgrade our way of working, and we try to become even better at what we do. Focusing on these areas will help us become more efficient, but is that enough?

As a leader and manager, you may feel that it has become more difficult to reach targets and goals e.g. it takes more time than predicted or requires more effort. You may feel that the change initiatives you launch to improve your situation do not yield the effect and the outcome you desire.

This session will focus on the fact that it is you who hold the key to unlock the potential of the organization. The way to increase flexibility and thereby gain speed is to be the change you want to see. By upgrading your own internal operating system, you will gain additional tools to your leadership toolbox and improve your ability to scale your leadership. You will also be able to use your old leadership tools more effectively.

Ulrika Thell is a human centered change agent, an agility in leadership expert (ICE-AL) and a Meditation Teacher & Coach. She has 25 years of experience working in the automotive industry, with over two decades in different leadership positions. Cross functionally, nationally and internationally.

Ulrika has aways been intrigued by change and willing to test new things. As a leader she has had the privilege to drive change and it is her experience that when you do, it is of outmost importance to do that from the heart and with a human centered approach. This has become a driving force for Ulrika in recent years, as change comes from within and the speed of change and the need of flexibility is ever increasing. This requires more diverse perspectives and affect our behaviors and culture as well. Therefore she also state the importance of personal growth as an item on the daily agenda of a successful business, equally important as deliveries and customers et al.

Learning Session and Networking Break

Servant Leadership

Peter Palmér, Scania

Servant leadership isn’t about authority—it’s about empowerment. Great leaders create the conditions for teams to thrive. In Lean product and process development, top-down control slows progress, while servant leadership accelerates it. Instead of dictating, servant leaders empower teams with clarity, autonomy, and trust—enabling them to solve problems, harvest on opportunities, and deliver value. This approach fosters innovation, engagement, and long-term success. Peter will explore how this leadership style fosters high performance by aligning people with purpose and enabling decentralized decision-making. He will discuss real-world applications, challenges, and why leading with “pull” rather than “push” is essential for sustainable growth. When leaders step back and serve, teams take ownership—and that’s when real transformation happens.

Peter Palmér has extensive experience in lean management in both production and product
development, as well as experience of leadership in other cultures. With 18 years of
experience within production, engineering and quality followed by 20 years in various
management positions in product development Peter have many stories to tell. Since the
beginning of the 1990es he has been closely involved with the Scania Way development
journey both in Sweden and South America.

He is a frequent speaker at international and national conferences on the subject of LPD and
leadership. Peter has been working closely with LPPDE since the organization's start 2008
including seven years on the LPPDE board with a second period started 2023. Through
LPPDE Peter has organized and chaired or co-chaired many conferences in Europe and in
the US. Since the end of 2020 he runs the monthly LPPDE Virtual Summits, a four-hour learning exchange with four different speakers. He is a member of various LPD-networks and
has co-developed LPD training courses with Chalmers Professional Education and The KTH
Royal Institute of Technology.

Traditional Leadership

Bengt Johansson, Lean Peak Solutions

Leadership has always played a pivotal role in shaping societies, organizations, and cultures. Traditional leadership, characterized by hierarchical structures and authority, has historically ensured order and stability within communities and organizations. It is deeply rooted in cultural heritage, with leaders serving as custodians of customs and values, fostering identity and unity. In his talk, Bengt will highlight key areas for exploration. These include the strengths of traditional leadership, such as its ability to inspire stability and trust, as well as its challenges, like resistance to change. He will also examine how we can blend the enduring strengths of traditional leadership with modern approaches to create more adaptive and forward-thinking leadership models.

Bengt Johansson has spent his entire working life at ASSA ABLOY and has seen the company grow to a global champion. Bengt has been working around 25 years with product development in different roles, production engineering, through quality management and product development. The latest 15 years Bengt spent in ASSA ABLOYs Lean Innovation program where he has been the Global Lean Innovation Manager the latest 6 years.

Learning Session and Lunch

AI-Powered Bottom-Up Assessments: Accelerating R&D through team empowerment

Ludvig Åhlin, Swedbank

In this session, Ludvig Åhlin will share a proven and innovative approach to agility assessments used at one of his banking assignments, leveraging AI to empower R&D teams in their efforts to shorten time-to-market. This bottom-up method focuses on team-level insights, fostering collaboration and efficiency across the organization.

Ludvig will introduce you to a systematic approach that involves conducting team-level agility assessments, incorporating feedback from various aspects of agile methodologies. The format includes interactive sessions where teams provide insights and improvement ideas, ensuring they own their growth actions and are encouraged to seek support as needed.

This approach is rooted in real-world experience, having been successfully applied in a banking context where line managers sought to enhance team efficiency. By using AI to analyze assessment data, leaders gain actionable insights that enable informed decisions. The approach leads to enhanced agility in product development, improved alignment between team capabilities and organizational goals, and foster a culture of continuous learning.

Through live demonstrations, Ludvig will show how AI tools can be used to derive valuable insights from assessment data. This session is ideal for R&D managers, agile leaders, and executives interested in improving team efficiency and innovation.

You will leave with a clear understanding of how to implement AI-powered assessments in your organization, strategies to enhance agility, and tools to foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Ludvig Åhlin is an accomplished Agile Coach and SAFe SPCT candidate at Swedbank, where he has been pivotal in driving agile transformations since September 2023. Prior to joining Swedbank, Ludvig was a consultant at Accenture, where he helped various companies across industries such as telecommunications, manufacturing, and banking with their SAFe journeys.

With over a decade of experience in agile methodologies and a deep understanding of SAFe, Ludvig has successfully led numerous initiatives focused on maximizing business value by empowering teams and leverage scaling effects. His session promises to offer valuable insights into creating more accurate, team-centric assessments that drive real-world improvements in R&D efficiency and time-to-market.

Making Requirements Less Dumb

Markus Nordstrand, Senior Systems Engineer at Kongsberg Automotive

A successful entrepreneurial system designer once said: "Your requirements are definitely dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you; it's particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough. This will allow you to delete a part or process step. After this you can simplify or optimize your product or process, knowing that you will not optimize something that is unnecessary. This is the most common errors that smart engineers make; optimizing something that should not exist. After this, the cycle time can be decreased to shorten the time-to-market. It's critical to do the first two steps correctly; if you are digging your grave, don't dig it faster! Stop digging your grave! Finally, you can add automation."

Requirements are hard since they involve people, are contextual, have multiple parts and the general competence of defining requirements is low among the engineering workforce. This leads to a lot of dumb requirements. Different methods obfuscate requirements by redefining the concept by using terms like User Stories, Design Criteria, Customer Interest Decisions instead of requirements, but the underlying need of using textual requirement statement to communicate and scope a product development initiative is still there.

In this talk, we'll learn how tossing the requirement baby out with the waterfall bathwater might not be such a good idea and by ignoring them you will actually cause more unnecessary human suffering (evil) and waste.

It will be argued that requirements management done right can be very valuable, and by removing dumb requirements you will per definition waste less time managing them. 

Markus Nordstrand is an Associate Systems Engineering Professional (ASEP) with the International Counsil On Systems Engineering (INCOSE). The last six years, he has been working as a Systems Engineer at Kongsberg Automotive who has a rich history of applying Knowledge-Based Development principles à la Michael N. Kennedy and Allen C. Ward. Before this, he worked at Volvo Cars and witnessed how the SAFe implementation there completely ignored systems engineering and requirements management and how the SAFe hype train eventually wore out. He has made it his professional mission to make systems engineering great and to crack the code of how to tailor the approach for different circumstances, especially during times when the buzzword pendulum swings to the lean-agile part of the order-chaos dichotomy.

Learning Session and Networking Break

Learning from LPPDE

Geoff Neiley, Rapiscan

I learn from every LPPDE conference I attend says Geoff Neiley. In this presentation Geoff will share how he prepares for a conference and, more important, what he does when he comes home! 

He has not missed a conference since his debut in Austin, TX 2015 and will share his learnings conference by conference. 

Geoff Neiley has been in the mechanical engineering field for 30 years. After graduating from the University of Maine, Orono, he learned much about the custom equipment business at NESLAB Instruments designing water chilling systems. Following this he spent 15 years working for BTU International where he designed and lead projects for conveyorized furnaces using in the electronics and solar industry. During this time, he earned his master’s in mechanical engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. It was at BTU where Geoff began to see the value of concurrent engineering. Geoff joined AS&E in 2011 where he led the mechanical team to introduce state-or-the-art x-ray products for the security market. Three years after joining AS&E (now Rapiscan Systems) in 2011, the leadership team introduced the concept of Lean Product Development. Geoff joined the leadership team reading many Lean PD books, inviting Lead PD practitioners to AS&E and attending LPPDE for several consecutive years. AS&E has roundly embraced the concurrent engineering aspects of Lean PD focusing greatly of Set-Base Innovation and cross-functional collaboration with our supply chain and manufacturing team. In 2022, Geoff took the role of Director of Continuous Product Improvement and Configuration Management. In his new role, he continues to leverage his learning from 8-years for practicing LPPD. Geoff has been a member of the board of Lean Product and Process Development Exchange since 2019. Today he is still learning and experimenting with lean processes and enjoys the pride felt in enabling a cross-functional team to achieve challenging, rewarding goals.

The Future is Already Here - So How do We Deal with it?

Mikael Lundgren, Founder, Business consultant at Levla

The Yamaha DX7 not only revolutionized the concept of music synthesizers, but also shaped the sound of popular music for a decade with a sound that is currently making a comeback - yet is so mathematically complex to program that everyone just uses the existing sounds over and over!

What can develop an AI system for programming the world's most famous and complex synthesizer tell us about the current state and future of machine learning? In this engaging talk, Mikael will use his experience of Generative AI and his insights in the current state of research to paint the picture of what is reasonable to expect from machine learning now, and in the near future, but also the weaknesses to be mindful about when shaping your strategy for utilizing machine learning in your product development.

Mikael Lundgren has a deep experience of Lean and Agile, in particular Scrum from many types of service- and product developing organizations. He lives for learning, and sharing his experience and insights with the people he works with. Mikael is a consultant transformation leader, interim manager, Lean/Agile mentor, and appreciated trainer and speaker within areas of Service- and Product Development, Product Management, Organizational Change and Management. He is a good communicator, leader and facilitator, and always work with the aim to make things work in practice. He works with start-ups as well as big corporations in Sweden, Scandinavia and Europe, through the people in the organization. Mikael believes growth comes from learning, applying, then teaching your peers, something that permeates all of his work with leaders, management teams and executives. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer since January 2006.

Learning Session and Networking Break

Closing Address

Peter Palmér, Conference chair, LPPDE

What learnings and practices will you be taking back with you to apply on Monday morning?

Back to work:

• Share your learnings
• Run experience
• Learn fast
• Implement

End day two and of the conference