Jürgen De Smet

Hi, I’m Jürgen. I started my professional career in 1996 as employee number 12 in a small software product company (Quadrat). As you can imagine, in a small organization like this, one doesn’t get boxed into a specific role or component (or anything, actually). I was part of a larger team that did everything: talking to users, coding, refactoring, front-end, back-end, database, reporting, documenting, customer support, production monitoring…the full spectrum of activities you can imagine must be handled to build and maintain a successful product. A company culture of musketeers—all for one, one for all. It was an eye-opening experience to say the least.

Things were a bit chaotic at the start. In small organizations, it is culture (or a lack of it) that defines structure. When more employees joined in 1998, more structure was required. As team lead, I added more focus on adopting XP practices and Scrum based on a two-pager and the “The New New Product Development Game” paper, by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, I discovered. Business went strong, and in 2001, the company was acquired by a large corporation (Agfa), meaning more processes, functions, roles and boundaries were put in place. This slowed down the software product development tremendously! Being a bit of a rebel, I didn’t comply with much of what was imposed and kept going strong with my team based on XP/Scrum.

Around 2005-2006, the benefits of XP/Scrum were recognized and I was asked to onboard more of the organization into this kind of setup. Before I knew it, I was part of the leadership team managing five sites in Europe with over 300 people. As a fan of simplification, I was the driver of keeping things lean and mean—a single Excel sheet was the backlog for the entire organization (enterprise backlog), broad definitions of scope kept things simple, and there were very few coordination roles and governing units. Check out the full story at: https://less.works/case-studies/agfa-healthcare

In 2009, I was bored of being an employee and went freelance, helping other organizations to simplify their structures and processes while always taking care of the necessary technical excellence as an enabler for simplicity. To date, I have guided many organizations to deliver on their commitments to high performance. My clients have reported benefits like 400% productivity gains, 81% improvement on lead times, more than 90% delivered according to the roadmap, extremely high employee satisfaction, and so forth. See: https://youtu.be/T4jC1MsznyA

As organizations grow, so does unnecessary complexity. I work with executive teams to simplify operations, cut dead weight from the system, and scale what matters. Whether the goal is faster innovation, better alignment, or navigating disruption, I help companies unlock performance without adding overhead.

By addressing where the system drags or misfires, I help executives shift their role from controlling everything to unlocking performance everywhere. For example:

➸ Horizontal complexity — Consolidating functions across the enterprise, growing highly effective cross-functional teams.

➸ Vertical complexity — Shedding obsolete roles, layers, and reporting structures to facilitate fast decision-making and increased flexibility.

➸ Spatial complexity — Preparing distributed and remote teams for success (digital is in my genes).

➸ Technical complexity — Removing technical debt by decoupling, XP, and DevOps practices, and growing products instead of building them.

➸ Cognitive complexity – applying AI redesigning the SDLC to amplify thinking, automate grunt work, and shift human effort toward creative problem solving.

Clients walk away with clearer priorities, fewer blockers, and data that drives decisions. No more chasing alignment across siloed teams, just systems that move in one direction: forward.

Lately, at my clients, I’ve been redesigning the SDLC for a modern, AI-augmented world. Embedding AI in product discovery, delivery and operations. From crafting custom agents using the LangChain stack to enabling AI-first development teams, the game is changing and I’m here to play it smart.

Do you want to unlock strengths inside your organization’s culture to navigate new markets and technologies so you come out ahead of competition? Commitment to high performance means removing whatever stands in the way. Reach out to me - I bring intense curiosity to learn about your context and circumstances.

Feel free to connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jurgendesmet/ And, checkout my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JurgenDeSmetCSO

For companies that endure, simplicity brings its own rewards.