Nobody is hiring a Chief Intersection Officer. Nobody has a budget line for a Head of In-Between, a Psychological Safety Engineer, a Slow Adopter Shepherd, or a Distributed Teams Gardener.

These titles don’t exist, but the need behind them does. And somewhere in your organisation, someone is probably covering that ground anyway—unofficially, invisibly, and without a mandate.

The Hiring System Wasn’t Built For This

Job boards, ATS, recruiters with briefs—they’re all optimised for labels. Specialist or expert labels. The kind you can match to a box. Why are we so stuck with labels? Naming is hard enough as it is. So we default to the nearest approximation, post the job, and wonder why the shortlist feels slightly wrong.

The problem isn’t specialists vs generalists. The more interesting question is: what happens at the intersection of two or more specialist fields? That’s where new connections and meanings get made. That’s where the most impactful and rarest roles live. And that’s precisely where the hiring system breaks down completely.

David Epstein explored the generalist advantage in Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. People who move across domains make connections that specialists, working in depth, rarely see. It’s not just generalists who do this. It’s specialists who refuse to stay in one box.

What I Mean By Intersection

Here’s what this has looked like across my own working life (roughly one or more seven year cycles for each era):

As a Scrum Master, I was also deep in systems thinking, mindfulness, organisational culture, and group dynamics. The Scrum events were the visible part. The rest was what made them actually work, and what made the value real.

As a Senior Front-End Developer, I was also becoming a Web Accessibility Specialist—while pulling in usability, UX, DX, work processes, and the psychology of how teams work and make decisions together. The code was the output. The craft was wider than that.

As a Communications Officer, I was also editing layout for publications, liaising with network infrastructure vendors, and writing small apps on LAMP stack to support an aviation lobby’s policy work.

As a Musician, I was also teaching drums, studying composition, and learning music software. Performing together and teaching sharpened each other. Learning music software opened a door I didn’t expect.

The pattern here isn’t distraction or inattention. It isn’t a lack of focus either. Each time I held a formal specialist title, I was also doing adjacent things. And those adjacent things were precisely what made the specialist work better, paving the way to new paths. The connections across domains are the value, not a coordination tax on it.

The AI Question

AI makes specialists redundant, so be a generalist. Right? I don’t think that’s quite right either.

What AI changes is the cost of the specialist knowledge itself—not the judgment about when and how to apply it, not the ability to see across fields, and certainly not the human relationship work that makes any of it land in an organisation.

If anything, the intersection roles become more valuable when AI can handle both the shallow and the deep. What remains irreplaceable is the multi-disciplinary synthesizer—not just a person, but the AI-augmented team that collectively knows which depth to reach for, why, and what it connects to across the rest of the map.

The Job Ad Problem

Every time I read a job posting now, I find myself mentally deconstructing it: this role has elements of what I do, but it’s missing whole areas I’m good at. The description points at a problem. But the title and the expected background often point somewhere else entirely.

To really understand what a company needs, you have to read past the label and find the challenge underneath. That’s a skill too. And it lives at an intersection.

You Are Not Your Job Title

Teal organisations, self-managing teams, role fluidity—these ideas exist because some people have already noticed that the box doesn’t fit the work.

I haven’t worked in a teal organisation yet. But I’ve worked in enough conventional ones to know what gets lost when someone who lives at the intersection doesn’t have a seat at the table.

You’re not your job title. You’re the sum of everything you’ve explored, and the connections you’ve built between those explorations. A smarter way of working is always there, waiting for your action.

If you’re reading this and thinking yes, and I don’t know what to call myself either—welcome. You might be exactly who I’m talking about.

I’m curious: where do you sit on the specialist–generalist spectrum? Does the intersection idea change how you think about it? Have you invented your own job title out of necessity?

Will my job exist in a few years? Focusing on individual roles is understandable, but far less attention is paid to how AI will reshape teams and collaborative work. That’s the more interesting question.

What if the future of high-performing teams is the triad: a small, empowered three-person unit partnered with AI? Whether AI is considered a tool or a team member is an open question—but the distinction matters for accountability and decision-making.

Why Triads?

The Scrum Guide recommends teams of ten or fewer. That was sound advice in a pre-AI world, where a cross-functional team needed enough people to cover all necessary skills. But when AI can cover entire capability gaps on its own, the calculus changes. How many humans does a self-managing team actually need?

Three turns out to be a surprisingly powerful number. In a triad:

• No one is ever alone with a problem
• If someone is sick or away, work continues without crisis
• Cognitive load stays manageable—work gets sliced into small, fast chunks
• Deep focus time and collaborative flow can coexist, without coordination becoming a bottleneck

But why not dyads (two people) and an AI? Because the third person changes the group dynamics entirely. Dyads tend toward binary tension: agreement or disagreement. A third person introduces mediation, new perspectives, and richer interaction. It also, simply, makes the work more enjoyable.

Think of a music trio: each player is autonomous, but the interplay between three creates something no other combination quite matches. That dynamic tension is exactly what makes the triad powerful.

The Layer Above: Tribal Leadership

Coding was seldom the real bottleneck. A loosely-coupled and distributed network of triads doesn’t operate in a vacuum. With AI handling much of the execution, the real bottleneck shifts to strategy, direction, and culture.

This is where ”tribal leaders” come in. Not managers in the traditional sense, but coaches and connectors who understand multi-cultural team dynamics, embed product thinking, facilitate feedback loops, link teams to customers, and actively eliminate cross-team dependencies. They create the conditions for triads to thrive: shared values, psychological safety, trust, and a clear sense of purpose.

Practices like Troika Consulting—a structured peer-coaching method from Liberating Structures—are exactly the kind of lightweight tools that make this layer work without adding bureaucracy.

Potential weaknesses

No model is perfect. The tribal leader layer creates a potential single point of failure—though this is mitigated by overlapping triad relationships and strong shared values across the network. Onboarding can be harder in a triad: swapping one person changes the entire dynamic, so rotation needs to be intentional.

AI dependency is real: AI tools hallucinate, and small teams may be more vulnerable to over-trusting them without the checks a larger team provides. Not all work suits this model: highly regulated or safety-critical environments may need more oversight than three people can reasonably provide.

Is This Agile For The People Who Gave Up On Agile?

The triad model is lean, human-centered, and built for a world where AI handles capability gaps. It sidesteps the overhead that makes scaled agile frameworks feel like the disease rather than the cure.

If you’ve ever said “agile doesn’t work here”, this might be worth a second look.

Are you already experimenting with something like this? I’d love to hear what you’re seeing.

Further Reading That Inspired This Article

• Henrik Kniberg: Agile in the Age of AI
• Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais: Team Topologies
• Dave Logan, John King, Halee Fischer-Wright: Tribal Leadership
• Liberating Structures: Troika Consulting

This Sunday, April 19, 2026, marks my last day at Nion, and I wanted to take a moment to say a proper thank you.

When I joined One Agency in 2018, I couldn’t have predicted half of what was ahead: a global pandemic, Russia’s genocidal war in Ukraine, the merger with Nion, and the rise of AI. Most of my One Agency colleagues who were there when I joined are now gone; though I remain a shareholder, my journey as an employee ends here.

Coming from both a product and technical background, I had already worked for 15 years in several European countries before joining. At Nion, I worked for three different clients over the last eight years: Sony, Skatteverket, and Trygg-Hansa, building relationships and teams, and delivering work that I’m glad was well received. It meant a lot to have their trust and the flexibility that came with it.

My career path grew from my past development roles into Scrum Master, servant leader, and Team Coach roles I’d set my sights on long before joining. Over a quarter of a century, I’ve taken my career from code to lean-agile ways of working—a journey shaped by curiosity, change, and the people and distributed teams who made it all worthwhile.

I’m grateful for our time and opportunities together.

Now I’m off to see what comes next. I’m excited about how roles such as Product Owner, Delivery Lead, Agile Team Leader, Team Coach, and Scrum Master will transform due to AI and distributed ways of working. I believe the human side of the work—collaboration, cultural understanding, psychological safety, trust, coaching leadership, and product thinking—will matter more than ever. That’s what sustainable value delivery is built on (alongside technical excellence, of course).

Good luck in chasing the next bottleneck! I’d love to keep the conversation going on LinkedIn.

Many people are wondering how AI changes teams and ways of working. This is especially relevant for remote, distributed, and multicultural product teams.

When Clarity Comes At The Cost of Nuance

AI normalizes tone, flattens nuance, introduces various biases, and smooths out differences in pursuit of clarity and structure. Language barriers are reduced. But in multicultural product teams, nuance matters deeply. Cultures differ in how they express disagreement, how directly they give feedback, how they relate to authority, and how comfortable they are with conflict. Silence can mean reflection in one context and resistance in another. And as Erin Meyer reminds us in The Culture Map, individual differences layer on top of cultural ones in ways that are equally easy to misread.

What AI Can’t Read In The Room (or Online)

AI doesn’t understand those dynamics. It can summarize what was said, but not what was avoided. It can polish a message, but not judge whether the team is aligned in meaning. It can draft a retrospective, but not sense whether people feel psychologically safe enough to be honest. You can’t trust AI the same way you trust people.

AI may even amplify cultural misreads if teams aren’t intentional. With AI, teams may become smaller in size. But algorithmic and cultural biases in AI do little to help people collaborate under uncertainty, especially in multicultural environments.

Process Versus Sense-Making

If anything, the rise of AI sharpens a distinction that was always there: the difference between process and sense-making. As procedural aspects of teamwork become faster and easier to automate, human interaction becomes more visible and valuable. Facilitating difficult conversations, surfacing implicit tensions, building trust across cultures, helping teams navigate uncertainty: these don’t delegate easily to an agent.

For those who built their professional identity around maintaining process, AI may feel threatening. For those whose work is about enabling collaboration and developing capability, it’s more of a shift than a replacement. I’ve experienced this in practice in my work assignments.

The Differentiators That Remain

The differentiators become cultural intelligence, trust, facilitation, coaching leadership, strategic curiosity, and sense-making. That’s where deliberate attention belongs: protecting cross-cultural connection and trust, designing remote-friendly and human-centered ways of working, and building teams with AI-augmented delivery capabilities.

AI is forcing us to rediscover the human core of effective distributed and multicultural teamwork. And that still requires us.

This isn’t a piece about AI technology. It’s a reflection on teamwork, culture, and what remains irreducibly human. It’s based on my own experience working with distributed multicultural teams.

Agree, disagree, or something in between? What’s your experience?

The Big Picture

It’s a System

2025 was a challenging year, but not a hopeless one. As with my reflections from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020), I start with the big picture because we don’t live in a vacuum. The world is a system where everything affects everything else.

Instability

In many ways, 2025 felt like watching a sequel you didn’t want to see. The rise of fascism and authoritarianism, deepening polarization, racism, waves of misinformation, and our collective inaction on climate change made it harder to imagine where we’re heading.

I found myself returning to three questions throughout the year:

• Why are so many people silent about these developments?
• Where are the leaders who bring hope rather than division?
• Why aren’t there more women in positions of leadership?

I don’t have any answers, but I’ll keep going.

The Global Russian Threat

Russia’s genocide against Ukraine and Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza continued to test my faith in humanity. Russia is waking each day to plan new ways to terrorize and destabilize other nations, while the European leaders remain largely passive, sleepwalking, and watching the terror unfold.

What I Can Change

I return to what I can actually change: myself. My approach has been to learn more about what matters to me, to stand firmly in my values and principles, and to hope that my thoughts and actions might resonate with others, too.

My 2025

Agile

Reports of Agile’s death remain greatly exaggerated. Perhaps it has retreated back to the mountains, regrouping? I haven’t seen anything better emerge to replace it. If anything, agile leadership is needed more than ever.

What concerns me is the declining demand for roles dedicated to team development and ways of working: Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, delivery enablers. If continuous improvement isn’t optional, who’s driving it forward now?

The market feels unstable, roles are evolving, new ones are emerging. I choose to see this as an opportunity rather than a threat.

AI

People keep asking when the AI bubble will burst. Meanwhile, I use ChatGPT and Claude daily—mostly for writing assistance, brainstorming, and working through both professional and personal topics.

AI assistants are valuable tools, not teammates you can fully trust. We haven’t seen the full implications of this field yet, including its environmental impact.

Work

December 2025 brought an ending: my three-and-a-half-year consulting engagement at Trygg-Hansa concluded due to strategic restructuring.

After years of building relationships, developing distributed multicultural teams, and creating impact, it ended—not because of failure, but because of forces beyond my control. That’s the nature of consulting, but it doesn’t make it easier.

Despite the uncertainty, 2025 was professionally rich. I facilitated workshops and sessions to develop team capabilities across diverse topics:

• Psychological safety (using Amy C. Edmondson’s research and survey tools)
• The five dysfunctions of a team
• Agile ways of working and scaled agile approaches
• Lean software development and identifying the seven wastes
• Resource vs. flow optimization and the efficiency paradox
• The Kanban method and workflow visualization
• Flow metrics, queues, and Little’s Law
• Lifecycle methods and continuous delivery
• Feedback, feedforward, and communication practices
• Skills development and learning cultures
• Slicing work into sprint-sized value increments
• Experimenting with diverse retrospective formats

Some moments stood out: meeting almost the entire team physically in Malmö for team days (though we missed connecting with our offshore colleagues in person), online sessions with Woody Zuill and Gil Broza exploring software teaming and collaboration, and walk-and-talks with former colleagues that reminded me why I do this work.

A big thank you to all my great colleagues! 🙏

Books

Reading remained my anchor: I read (or listened to) 52 books this year. A few that shaped my thinking:

• Software Teaming by Woody Zuill
• Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
• How Not To Die by Michael Greger
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum
• On Freedom by Timothy Snyder

Writing

I published 16 articles this year on this website, sharing copies to Medium, LinkedIn and other social media. Topics ranged from feedback practices to collaboration, capability development, team growth, and continuous improvement. Writing helps me process.

Exercise and Wellbeing

These activities kept me grounded when everything else felt uncertain:

• Walked over 3200 kilometers (averaging nine kilometers daily, tracked via Google Fit)
• Ski touring and skiing in the Italian Alps in April
• Climbed my sixth and seventh 4000-meter peaks in the Alps while trekking in Cervinia in August
• Tried bouldering for the first time with colleagues from Nion
• Explored new corners of Portugal around Sesimbra in September: Lagoa de Albufeira, Aldeia do Meco, and Alfarim
• Spent time in Finnish Lapland
• Created and published seven video edits on my my YouTube channel (remember to subscribe 🙂)

I continued my pescatarian diet and long-standing mindfulness practice, both of which feel less like disciplines now and more like how I naturally live.

I started using the Monash FODMAP app for detailed food guidance, and added the 7-Minute Workout to my routine.

Music

On December 4, 2025, I finally saw Radiohead live at Royal Arena in Copenhagen. Getting tickets felt like winning the lottery. The show reminded me why I’ve loved them for decades, even if the sound mix was horrible!

I also saw the “Becoming Led Zeppelin” documentary in February, which was interesting, if not ground-breaking.

Returning to my first love, music, I bought the Behringer U-Phoria UMC204HD audio interface and began transferring gigs and rehearsal recordings from analog cassettes to digital format. For those who don’t know my origin story: I started my career as a drummer.

Working with my old Yamaha QY10 sequencer and software like Reaper, Finale (discontinued), MuseScore, and Audacity has been fun.

I’m currently selling my old Gretsch drum kit—not because I’ve lost love for it, but because it deserves to be played, and my life has moved in different directions.

Family

For several years now, I’ve been caring for my elderly parents, both of whom suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Both turned 90 in 2025. I’m already my mother’s legal guardian, and I’m in the process of officially becoming my father’s guardian as well.

After a lengthy administrative process and six months of them living separately, they finally moved back together in March 2025—into a new nursing home, in a new city.

This reality shapes my life. It requires flexibility in my work arrangements, regular visits, constant administrative tasks, and an emotional toll that’s hard to quantify. Watching your parents slowly disappear while their bodies remain is its own kind of grief.

What I've Learned

But here’s what I’ve learned: work is what you do, not where you are. Flexibility isn’t a perk; it’s essential for anyone balancing professional contribution with human responsibility and connection. Recent years have taught me that effective work and family care can coexist when organizations choose trust and flexibility over control and presenteeism.

As for friendships, I’ve intentionally reconnected with old friends and acquaintances this year. Those conversations reminded me who I’ve been and who I’m becoming.

Looking Toward 2026

Here’s what I’m committing to and why:

• Professionally: Find remote or hybrid work as Delivery Lead, Agile Team Leader, Team Coach, Scrum Master, Product Owner, or similar—roles that build on my experience developing distributed multicultural teams. Flexibility is essential to the future of work, and for balancing work life with family responsibilities. I’m open to both consulting and permanent roles in a sustainable, trust-based work culture.
• Family responsibilities: Prepare my parents’ apartment—my childhood home—for sale and manage the process from start to finish. Continue handling guardianship duties with the attention they deserve.
• Physical goals: Climb my eighth 4,000-meter peak in the Alps by autumn, walk eight kilometers daily, and maintain 2-3 weekly workouts balancing strength and cardio.
• Intellectual life: Read at least one book weekly, write 10 articles, and continue producing photo and video content. These practices keep me thinking, processing, and contributing.
• Core intention: Be useful to others, recognizing that my skills, experience, and perspective have value when shared.

💡 So here’s my hope for 2026: make empathy a choice we make repeatedly, especially when it’s difficult.

Thanks for reading. Wishing you a meaningful 2026! ✨

Slava Ukraini! 🌻 🇪🇺

After years of hoping, I was finally about to see Radiohead live.

Getting here hadn’t been easy. Thousands were shut out during the September 2025 ticket lottery, so landing tickets in the second sale in October felt like a miracle. Then came Thom Yorke’s throat infection, which postponed the first two Copenhagen dates. Even on the day of the show—December 4th—we didn’t receive confirmation they’d actually perform until noon.

Arriving at the venue, I wondered how a band like Radiohead would translate to such a large arena. Their recordings are famously intricate sonic landscapes: multi-layered instrumentation, polyrhythmic arrangements, subtle textures that reveal themselves over repeated listens. These are songs built like architecture, where every element occupies its own carefully designed space. Could all of that survive in a space this vast?

My concerns proved partially justified. From where we stood on the general admission floor, the mix struggled to capture what makes Radiohead distinctive. The bass dominated everything: a low-end rumble that flattened the sonic spectrum. Thom Yorke’s vocals and keyboards, and Jonny Greenwood’s multi-instrumental contributions cut through intermittently. It was disorienting to watch musicians labor over their instruments while hearing almost nothing of their contributions.

Oddly, when I checked the short video clips on my phone afterward, the band sounded better in those recordings than they had live. Whatever the phone’s microphone captured seemed to pick up a more balanced mix than what the PA system was projecting to our location.

But perhaps my expectations needed calibrating. This is, after all, an energetic rock band with exceptional composing and songwriting talent. Much of Radiohead’s essence centers on Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, as their The Smile side project demonstrates.

Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that a better sound mix would have revealed the full picture: that Radiohead is an ensemble where all the musicians contribute to their distinctive sound. When these elements collapse into muddy bass and isolated vocals, you’re hearing a fraction of what Radiohead is.

Despite the technical frustrations, I’m left with something valuable: the experience of seeing Radiohead live.

The setlist on Dec 4, 2025:

• Planet Telex
• 2 + 2 = 5
• Sit Down. Stand Up.
• Lucky
• 15 Step
• The Gloaming
• Kid A
• No Surprises
• Videotape
• Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
• Idioteque
• Everything in Its Right Place
• Bloom
• The National Anthem
• Daydreaming
• (Nice Dream)
• Let Down
• Bodysnatchers

Encore:

• Fake Plastic Trees
• Jigsaw Falling Into Place
• Paranoid Android
• All I Need
• You and Whose Army?
• Just
• Karma Police

You’re waiting in line when someone cuts in front of you. Frustrating, right?

Yet we do this constantly in software development. Something “urgent” arrives, and we drop everything. The work we were doing? It goes back to the queue—invisible, forgotten, accumulating.

This invisible queue is inventory. It’s hidden waste, not value. And it directly extends our cycle time.

Here’s what most teams miss: queues are mostly waiting time. We optimize for keeping people busy (easy to see) while ignoring the growing queues (hard to see). The busier we are, the more inventory we create. And the higher the Cost of Delay becomes for everything waiting.

As Donald Reinertsen writes in Principles of Product Development Flow: Queues are leading indicators of future cycle-time problems.

Many organizations are blind to the queue problem in knowledge work. What helps you see yours? Would making it visible change what you optimize for?

Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata captures something crucial about process:

💡 We cannot leave a process alone and expect high quality, low cost, and stability. A process will tend to erode no matter what... The best and perhaps only way to prevent slipping back is to keep trying to move forward, even if only in small steps.

In other words: processes naturally decay. Sustainable performance isn’t about working harder—it’s about continuously and incrementally improving the process flow.

I’m curious: Who owns continuous improvement in your organisation? Is it a dedicated role like a Delivery Lead or Agile Coach, integrated into team leads’ responsibilities, or something else entirely? 🤔

Over the years, I’ve collected principles that guide how I lead and work. Here are the ones I return to most often:

• People first: their growth and wellbeing matter more than processes
• Flexibility with accountability
• Knowledge work is what you do, not where you are
• Real change happens when you change your habits
• Be strategic about what you’re curious about
• Connect with your team(s) and develop them relentlessly
• Develop capabilities, not just practices
• Stop starting, start finishing
• Be clear about what you stand for

These aren’t just abstract ideals. They shape how I approach everything, from how I’m thinking about AI and new tools to how I structure my own life. I’ve also written several articles exploring these topics.

Right now, since many years, I’m caring for my elderly parents who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. That has deepened my belief that flexibility and trust aren’t just nice-to-haves—they’re essential for doing great work and living a full life.

What’s one principle that guides your work?

🌟 Currently seeking new opportunities in roles such as Delivery Lead, Team Lead, Team Coach, Scrum Master, and Product Owner—with flexibility to balance work and family care. Let’s connect!

I visited Portugal for the first time in 2008. A year later, my half-Portuguese, half-French colleague recommended his hometown, Sesimbra. I’ve returned nearly every year since. Here’s a selected breakdown of why Portugal is such an amazing country 🇵🇹.

📍 Places

This September we explored Lagoa de Albufeira, Aldeia do Meco and Alfarim, the areas around Sesimbra. Sesimbra is a place we return to year after year for its bright light, colours, the sea, welcoming locals, exceptional seafood—and fewer tourists.

Over the years we’ve visited the following places in Portugal (a partial list). From north to south:

Northern Portugal

• The Douro: Douro Valley (Pinhão), Porto

Central Portugal

• The Beiras: Aveiro, Coimbra, Figueira da Foz
• Estremadura: Nazaré, Óbidos
• The Lisbon Coast: Aldeia do Meco, Alfarim, Azenhas do Mar, Cabo Espichel, Cacilhas, Cascais, Colares, Ericeira, Estoril, Lagoa de Albufeira, Meco beach, Sesimbra, Setúbal, Sintra, Troia, Vila Fresca de Azeitão

Southern Portugal

• Alentejo: Cabo Sardão, Evora, Odeceixe, Porto Covo, Vila Nova de Milfontes, Zambujeira Do Mar
• Algarve: Faro, Tavira

A highlight: the 160-million-year-old dinosaur footprints on the cliffs of Cabo Espichel: Sauropods, Theropods and Ornithopods, frozen in stone.

Next on my list (Northern Portugal):

• Minho: Braga, Guimarães, Serra do Gerês

🦞 Food

Portugal’s culinary scene is a revelation. The Mercado do Livramente food market in Setúbal never fails to stagger me with its variety and quality—fish, shellfish, meat, regional products, cheese and fresh vegetables.

In Sesimbra alone, I’ve discovered zamburinhas at Marisqueira Modesto, the perfect espadarte (swordfish) at Tasca do Isaías, and countless other treasures. From Porto’s francesinha to Coimbra’s Pastel de Tentúgal, each region offers its own specialties.

Some Portuguese culinary highlights 🍴🍷

The restaurants in the above photos

1. Marisqueira Modesto, Sesimbra
2. Sociedade Musical Sesimbrense, Sesimbra
3. Tasca do Isaías, Sesimbra
4. Restaurante Isaura, Alfarim
5. Snack-Bar Formiga, Sesimbra
6. Restaurante Frango à Guia, Sesimbra
7. Cervejaria Brasão Aliados, Porto
8. Pastelaria Briosa, Coimbra
9. Pastelaria O Caseiro, Sesimbra

I’m only touching the surface, and I can’t wait to explore Portugal’s gastronomy further.

👥 People

The Portuguese I’ve met—colleagues and strangers alike—share a warm, easy-going humor. They value respect and consideration: don’t skip queues, attempt a few words of Portuguese, and always say obrigado. There’s a collective awareness here that contrasts with the destructive Scandinavian individualism.

Despite concentrated urban centers, Portugal feels remarkably uncrowded. Finding solitude and nature is easy, especially away from the southern coast.

Then there’s saudade—that untranslatable longing for something or someone absent. As a bittersweet type and a Finn, I recognize this feeling immediately ❤️.

✨ Beauty

Portugal’s beauty lies in its colours, light, ambience, craftsmanship and unpretentious way of living. The coastline—high cliffs, magnificent beaches, relentless waves—is mesmerizing. I could listen to the early morning sea forever.

Every visit reminds me of Aki Kaurismäki’s films: the same lighting, compositions, and unhurried characters. There’s something cinematically timeless here.

☀️ Weather

I haven’t experienced Portuguese winters yet, but shoulder seasons—September and early October—are perfect. Summers can be punishingly hot, worsening with climate change.

🌍 Climate Change

I’m not proud to fly to Portugal regularly. I offset this by living car-free and mostly pescatarian, but these are individual solutions to systemic problems. Real change requires political will, not just personal virtue—something climate strikes make painfully clear.

We lived through pandemic restrictions; climate action should be easier, yet here we are.

If individual behavior change is this hard, structural and systemic solutions are essential.

🗣️ Language

Portuguese isn’t easy, but I’m drawn to its sound—years of listening to Brazilian music will do that. The European variant is different, but equally compelling.

Learning the basics would deepen my connection to the country and help me see beyond the tourist’s perspective—toward a more balanced understanding.

🏡 The Future

Retiring in Portugal? Not a crazy idea. I’ll revisit this thought later in life.

As a tourist, I miss much of what makes Portugal tick. I’m curious to dig deeper.

💡 Sometimes you must return to beloved places to see how much you’ve changed.