LeSS Newsletter - April 2026
April 28, 2026Hi 👋
The industry spent two years replacing developers with AI. Now it is quietly hiring them back, because AI ships code without understanding why it exists. This month we dig into that paradox, share a landmark BMW case study on organizing 1,000+ engineers around autonomous driving, a new article from Bas Vodde, and look ahead to the LeSS community gathering in Prague and Tokyo.
What’s inside this month?
- ⛺ LeSS Coach Camp 2026
- 📖 Dealing with Spill-over Items by Bas Vodde
- 🇯🇵 LeSS2026 Tokyo - Call-for-Talks closed
- ☕ CafeTalk - How LeSS by Example generates revenue with Chokchai Phatharamalai
- 🤫 Why Companies Are Quietly Rehiring Software Engineers?
- 📚 LeSS Case Study: BMW Group - Autonomous Driving by Konstantin Ribel and Michael Mai
Enjoy, and keep learning!
— Bastiaan van Hamersveld
CEO at less.works, email: bastiaan@less.works
LeSS Coach Camp 2026
🎯 What happens when LeSS practitioners from around the world spend a few days together, not in a conference room listening to slides, but in an unconference built around real questions, real cases, and shared experience?
From 18 to 21 June 2026, the LeSS Coach Camp comes to Prague, bringing together experienced practitioners, coaches, and curious learners for deep conversations, practical workshops, and community learning. This year’s theme is Product Development in the age of AI, exploring how AI changes engineering practices, collaboration, feedback loops, and the future of product development.
💡 Why join?
- Shape the agenda yourself through open space sessions and LeSS-related topics
- Learn from real experience, case studies, exercises, and practitioner discussions
- Explore how AI influences product development, teams, users, and feedback loops
- Connect with the LeSS community in Prague, including dinner and sessions on the Botel Marina
⛺ Register for LeSS Coach Camp 2026 ➔
Dealing with Spill-over Items
🧑🍳 Spill-over isn't just a planning problem, it's a team health problem
Spill-over items don't just hurt velocity, they hurt teams. When work routinely bleeds from one Sprint into the next, it signals something deeper: a gap in shared ownership, estimation discipline, or how the team works together under pressure. Bas Vodde, co-creator of LeSS, has seen this pattern across hundreds of teams, and he wrote this article to help you address it at the root.
You'll learn the precise definition of spill-over (it's not what many teams think), why it matters beyond the numbers, practical approaches to prevent it, and the well-intentioned tactics that quietly make things worse. A focused read for any Scrum team serious about improvement.
LeSS2026 Tokyo - Call-for Talks is closed
🌅 The talks are in. Tokyo is next!
The call for talks is closed. The organising team starts reviewing now, and the program goes live in May!
On 8–9 October 2026, the global LeSS community convenes in Tokyo's Toyosu area for a joint edition with LeSS' Yoaké ASIA, under the theme *A Dawn for Adaptive Organisations*.
In Toyosu, there's plenty to explore beyond the conference, from early sushi breakfasts at Toyosu Market and the Edo-style food streets of Senkyaku Banrai to the immersive art of teamLab Planets, waterfront walks with views of Rainbow Bridge, and easy access to the rest of the city by water bus. Plenty of reasons to extend your stay.
Tickets from ¥33,000 ($207/€180).
👉 Join us in Tokyo for two days of serious learning, deep exchange, and a memorable corner of the city to explore around it.
🇯🇵 Visit the official website ➔
Video: CafeTalk - How "LeSS by Example" generates revenue
🧩 What happens when you stop explaining LeSS and simply let people see it?
In this conversation with Chokchai Phatharamalai from OOD in Thailand, we explore how opening up real LeSS teams for visitors creates powerful aha moments, builds trust, and even turns curiosity into commercial opportunities. People do not just hear about cross-functional teams, shared refinement, and organisational learning. They watch it happen.
💡 What you’ll discover:
- How “LeSS by Example” turns abstract ideas into visible, credible practice
- Why visitors leave with aha moments about teams, flexibility, and real collaboration
- How openness can create trust, demand, and new coaching opportunities
- What happened when experienced teams joined a client organisation to accelerate its LeSS adoption
A great watch for leaders, coaches, consultants, and trainers who want to understand how transparency can become a serious business advantage.
Why Companies Are Quietly Rehiring Software Engineers
🏗️ AI doesn't understand your business and that blind spot is now costing companies more than the developers they let go.
AI writes code fast. It just doesn't understand why the code exists. According to Gartner, more than 50% of errors in AI-generated code trace back to a lack of business context, not syntax mistakes, not broken logic, but a fundamental blindness to what the software is actually supposed to do. This is why 4 out of 10 development teams report compatibility failures when integrating AI-generated code into real systems. And it's why companies that quietly let go of 124,000 developers since 2024 are now quietly bringing them back.
Watch this video if you want the unfiltered numbers behind a shift the industry isn't announcing loudly. In 8 minutes you'll understand why 96% of developers don't trust AI-generated code, why Princeton researchers found AI fails to self-correct in more than 60% of cases, and why software hiring is skyrocketing in 2026, not despite AI adoption, but because of it. The key takeaway? The challenge in software development has moved. It is about maintaining code, fixing it, and understanding it well enough to know when a machine got it wrong.
LeSS Case Study: BMW Group - Autonomous Driving
📡 What does a real LeSS adoption look like inside a large car manufacturer?
Building self-driving cars is hard. Organizing 1,000+ people to build self-driving cars without slowing each other down is harder. BMW Group’s Autonomous Driving Campus took on both problems at once and the organizational solution turned out to be as technically demanding as the software itself.
They adopted LeSS Huge, a scaling framework that forces a fundamental trade-off: you give up central control in exchange for teams that can actually move. Feature teams took end-to-end ownership across software, testing, and integration. Hierarchical sign-offs disappeared. Developers tested their code in real vehicles the same day. The case study documents not just the structure they built, but the cultural resistance they had to overcome to make it stick, and what broke along the way.
You'll come away with a clear picture of how team design affects delivery speed, how to handle coordination at scale without creating bureaucracy, and what "feature team" actually means in a hardware-heavy environment, not as theory, but as a lived experiment at one of the world's largest automakers.
👉 Study this case to see how deep organizational change can create faster learning, less escalation, and a stronger ability to adapt.
🍿 Read the case study → 🧑🎓 Explore more case studies →
