your company is not ready for the magnitudes your CEO seeks
In nearly 30 years of software engineering, product design, and management Wil has seen how your company does product engineering. Be it at VC backed startups, unicorns, and multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies, he’s been there, and he has notes for you.
LLM’s are slick and all… but the hype doesn’t always meet the reality. At least, the reality doesn’t match the hype that your non-technical CEO and CTO have read about or heard about from their pals. The hype in the casual observer crowd is usually based on headlines of what AI CEOs last said at a conference. But, no one seems to remember Sam Altman declaring AI would solve the climate crisis by 2026. How’s that going?
Still, they whisper of exponential throughput increases, but what do these very real numbers I’ve seen people throw around really mean?
10000x (Someone I’m connected to said this to me on LinkedIn for real…) You’re hauling butt at 38.46 YEARS worth of work every work day!!
1000x? Likewise, with 260 working days a year, 1000x means you complete nearly 4 years (3.846) worth of work every 8 hour day you work.
100x? A year of output for you happens every 21 hours you work (~2.6 days.)
10x? You’ve replaced quarterly reports with weekly reports, because every 26 working days you complete a year’s worth of work.
So, when you say to me you’re trying to achieve a 50x increase in productivity I have to laugh a little. I’ve seen your software organization, I know the coordination layer of your business, and you aren’t ready for the future you seek.
Tell me:
How do you make business decisions?
How many hurdles do you have between an idea and “approving” that idea for development?
How many levels of bosses does an engineer need to traverse to change a plan when they see a problem with your plans?
How many hours a week is your company spending currently in planning and status meetings?
How much time does it take you to test a project, and declare it worthy of release?
What’s your advertising/marketing timeline required to prepare to launch a new product?
How quickly can your sales team spin up an effective sales strategy?
How are you going to do 50x more of all of this stuff 50x faster?
Tell me again how ready you really are for 50x more development speed, because I’ve been working in software development for ~30 years and for all of those years the company coordination layer is what has been holding back engineering throughput — be it at a startup or at a 5000 person org.
You are NOT ready for 50x speed (aka, 1 year of output every single week.)
How do you plan to make 50x more decisions a year?
How will you speak with customers to gain insights 50x more often?
How will you coordinate and ideate 50x faster?
I assume you’ve answered all these questions already, right? If not, you should get in touch with me or read my organizational playbook for a primer on how to start getting more engineering throughput from your team. I’m talking about High Trust, Aligned vs Managed, Flatten the Org Chart type stuff. These are the organizational table stakes for thinking about being an AI native company of the future and being able to harness its magnitudes should they transpire.
What are you doing to harness the increase and avoid the pitfalls?
