In 2024 I created the LEAD podcast with my good friend Geert van der Cruijsen. In this podcast we explored the various aspects of building an engineering culture. We made quite some episodes. With guests and without guests. And I thought it would be a great idea to share some of these stories combined with my insights from these episodes on this blog. All credits do not go to me. They go to Geert as well, and to our guests. And of course to Xebia, the company I work for, for making this possible.
This episode started with a pattern I see all the time. Developers pick up the top item from the backlog, build it, ship it, and move on. No one stops to ask what the real impact is. And when you ask leadership about the vision behind those items, many don’t have a clear answer either. So you end up with a company building things that may not actually matter. There’s a gap. Between the strategy and the engineers. Between the digital ambition and the daily work.
That’s why I found this conversation so insightful. It’s a story of how one team didn’t just adopt new technology, but rethought what digital transformation really means. Starting from purpose.
Not just digital for the sake of it
This guest worked in a company building high-end simulators for training professionals in a very specialized industry. Think full-scale bridge environments, realistic weather simulations, physical installations. They’d been doing it for decades. And then came the push: “We need to go digital.”
But instead of rushing into cloud or subscriptions or AI, they paused. They asked: what do we actually do? What’s our purpose? And how can digital help us do it better? That question changed everything.
A service, not a product
The result was a shift from selling physical simulators to offering simulation as a service. Accessible anywhere. No more relying on dedicated rooms, expensive hardware, or full-time support staff. The idea was to make training more scalable, more available, and more useful. Without breaking trust with existing customers.
Technically, that meant wrapping 30-year-old simulation software in containers, moving it to the cloud, and building a self-service delivery model. But again, that was the easy part. The real challenge was everything around it: new delivery models, new sales conversations, new customer expectations.
What stood out to me
What really stood out to me in this episode was how deliberate their approach was. Not flashy, not theoretical, just focused. A few patterns kept showing up in their story, and they made a lot of sense.
They started with purpose
Before anything else, they asked themselves why. Not what can we digitize, but what are we actually trying to improve. And who are we doing this for. It wasn’t about adding technology for the sake of it, it was about aligning with their original mission. That gave the digital vision weight. It made it real.
They made the vision concrete
No endless slides, no fancy frameworks. They built working demos. Something people could see and use. And that made all the difference. When someone can try something and it clicks, you don’t need to explain it much more. It creates buy-in without pushing.
They gave innovation room
This wasn’t something they asked a team to figure out in their spare time. They created a separate team with support from leadership. They gave them space to explore, to fail, to try again. And because of that, things actually moved forward. Innovation needs focus, not leftovers.
They planned the merge from the start
This wasn’t about building a new business next to the old one. It was about building something that could become part of the core. That’s a hard step. Merging new ways of working with old structures takes time and effort. But they knew from the beginning that this had to happen. That awareness helped them avoid getting stuck in a never-ending pilot mode.
Still transforming
Even after six years, they’re not done. The technology is running. The service is real. But the bigger transformation, how the organization operates, sells, and supports, is still ongoing. And that’s normal. Cultural and business shifts always lag behind technical ones.
What I liked most is how intentional this journey was. It wasn’t reactive. It wasn’t about chasing trends. It was about clarity. About building something meaningful, step by step. And about bringing the whole company along.
The original Episode
If you want to listen to the original episode, you can listen to this
The Road to ALM 