July 1st, kicking off our 2nd half, we promoted Jon Bragg to CPO. Congrats, it’s well deserved! I’d like to explain a little more why this role exists, because it explains clearly where Mindset is going.
Twenty years ago
Jon and I both started our careers at Accenture in the early 2000s. Both in the SAP Portal expert group, with Jon leaning more into BW / analytics. But we both had an early passion for changing the way companies interact with SAP.
Ten years later, we bumped into each other again at a major SAP Fiori conference – SAPinsider in Las Vegas. In 2015, Jon was one of the best Fiori / UX folks in the market, along with Andy Prier. We kept bumping into each other at conferences around the world, including some shenanigans in Amsterdam. But I did go and see his talks and they were all great, sharing similar ideologies to what I was building at Mindset. I distinctly remember both Andy / Jon sitting at a coffee shop, pitching the same customer I pitched earlier in the day. I won’t say which way that one went. 🙂
But not too long after, Jon joined Mindset – June of 2016, then Andy shortly after in August. We had the starts of a fantastic Fiori practice with our joint experiences. Over the next several years we shipped many dozens of Fiori apps. One great memory was a major home retailer, where we shipped more than a dozen Fiori apps across all of their stores. Product lookup, pack down, store walks, contractor workbenches, merchandising tools. We conducted field research and design thinking, and associates went from juggling t-codes to using beautiful apps (well, beautiful for back then, they would look much nicer now!). Here’s a few screen shots, and a link to the old story if you want to see some of the earlier stuff at Mindset (including how we would now do this with Joule Agents).
Store-floor SAP Fiori apps from the program, 2016 to 2017. Recreated and anonymized with AI, branding and data removed.
So this June marks Jon’s 10-year anniversary at Mindset, and the promotion the very next month!
10 years and some good questions
Since then, Jon has led dozens of customer engagements, carried our SAP partnership work, and helped run the company as part of the leadership team. He constantly asked – how do we learn to not just solve one problem, but build IP that helps us scale? Jon turned those lessons into assets, and helped form this habit into a product function.
We had some fun over this time too – with product retreats in Jon’s hometown of Park City, finding some trout, and here is a photo of us visiting the SAP AppHaus (well, nearby in Heidelberg), and a photo of our tiny TechEd booth back in 2016.
AI is changing things
Jon and his team then helped lead our shift from Fiori into BTP, then BDC, and now Joule. His team built the MIND catalog, which includes 20+ accelerators across Integration, Build, Analytics (BDC) and AI. At Sapphire, they shipped 20 Joule agents, validated by SAP, covering finance, sales, procurement, supply chain, and integration. And not just agents for AI, their team has built frameworks, playbooks, MCP servers that pipe SAP context into any model, and all the security and audit work beneath it. BTW – if you want to build an agent of your own, SAP put 100M euros behind funding customer Business AI projects, and Mindset has already helped 4 companies start in this process (as of today, but many more lined up behind them).
So we have built tools for AI, with AI. But the tools only matter because they are directed by experts with REAL domain depth, and every week our CoEs for Build, Analytics, Integration and AI use these tools in the field, give feedback, and flow the toolchain back and forth from R&D to the field.
Why this deserves a Chief title
The business model is changing, and products are what makes this all work. At Mindset we are moving from time and material projects to fixed-bid, outcome based work. You can only sell outcomes if you can deliver materially faster than the market, and that speed comes from our toolchain. Each consultant has a harness of agents and accelerators tuned by our CoEs who have delivered that exact project before. BTP environments for example used to take 80 hours to provision, and now we do that in 15 minutes. Estimating projects would take weeks, and now the MIND toolchain helps us do that in hours. Fiori app configurations are automated, and so much more.
So the goal for Jon for the rest of the year – more than half of all project work should be accelerated by MIND by Dec 31. The default method of delivery. Faster timelines, higher quality, more features per dollar, and data behind all of it.
One example of this – we have a tool that scans an SAP landscape and automatically identifies every Fiori app, config step, security role, and UX improvement and ties it to business personas. This is being extended to identifying Business AI and Joule agents as well. Defining a future UX for an enterprise on AI.
On top of that, SAP Signavio measures the processes, BDC provides data, BTP is what we build on, SAP LeanIX governs the agents, and SAP AppHaus methods help us design the experience – the AppHaus design something we have been doing since 2018, when we became the first US-based SAP AppHaus partner. But none of this works without the people who have deep expertise, have done the real projects, and can utilize agents and coach this new way of working. And that is Jon’s job now: R&D investment, product team and the MIND toolchain. You can see a preview here: mindsetconsulting.com/mind.
Kudos Jon, well deserved.
