The Firm, and Why It Exists.

Why I Started It

I started Anderson & Co because I lost patience with an industry.

I was leading digital transformation: making products people genuinely love to use and helping businesses disrupt themselves before the industry or a competitor could. The way we did that work mattered as much as the work, because how you change a business decides whether the change holds. So, reluctantly, I became a strong advocate for agile ways of working, and I waded into that world to make sure what I knew was sound. I took the certifications, then kept going into business architecture and the scaled ways of working that large organisations need.

I also found myself in classrooms being taught by people who had never written a line of code, never shipped a product and never led a department. So I tried to contribute from the inside, because why not learn from someone who had? What I found was that the certifying bodies wanted the curriculum kept narrow: the process of delivery, and only that. Anyone who followed me on LinkedIn in my enterprise coaching and business architecture years will remember the debates.

What those years taught me, more than any framework, was that a good leader is a coach. Manager as coach is not a soft skill bolted onto the job. It is a whole modality and a leadership style, and it is the one that makes capable people into leaders. So I studied executive coaching properly, with the International Coaching Federation, and it became the spine of how I lead, how I train and how I coach.

It also showed me the industry that had grown up around all of this. The agile boom produced a great many consultancies, and most of them were selling the same thing: a delivery loop. Sprint, review, repeat, at the lowest horizon a company has. Product owners who were really backlog clerks. Teams told they owned discovery and delivery with no idea how to do both. And almost nothing about product itself: product sense, discovery, user research, the testing of real hypotheses against real needs, or the long arc of a product through its life. The loop was the whole religion, and the thing it was meant to deliver had gone missing.

So I think of myself as a little post-agile. I still value it, and I’d expect any good team to work that way. It’s simply the norm now, and it’s no longer the most interesting part of the conversation. The work worth talking about is product itself: what to build, for whom and why.

A whole industry had been built by people who had never had to decide who should own what, or watched Conway’s law turn a sensible reorganisation into a train wreck because the system boundaries and the team boundaries disagreed. I had. That is a different kind of knowledge, and it is the kind worth the fee.

What Product Means Here

Product, to me, is lineage. Apple did not build the iPhone. It built the iPod, and the music store, and the device business that let the iPhone happen, and then it let the new product cannibalise the old. Draw it and it looks like an evolution chart: one product at the top, its ancestors underneath, each one born of the last, at different planning horizons. That is what I wanted to talk about, and nobody at the sprint board was talking about it. The chart is on the free tools shelf.

So I built a company to work on the whole thing: product strategy, discovery, research and delivery done by the same people, properly, inside an operating model that can carry it, with the business architecture and the ways of working to match.

Why "& Co"

The "& Co" is literal. For each engagement I assemble a small team of the best people I know for that specific problem, and nobody else. No bench, no juniors learning on your budget, no one in the room who is not needed. Anderson & Co is me, and the right company for the job.

Elle Anderson
Founder and Managing Director

Anderson & Co is based in the United Kingdom and works across the UK and Europe, remotely and on site. Professional standing: Elle Anderson is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute for IT, an elected member of BCS Council, and an ICF member coach. Engagements run under a written statement of work with agreed outcomes, and client material is handled under a confidentiality agreement as standard.

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