What we stand for
The agentic shift is real, and it is a real opportunity. It affects our organizations deeply, changing how we work and how we work together. We use these tools every day and enjoy them.
What we know, though, is that it is not about tooling, tokens, or any other output metric that happens to be easy to measure. It is about building better, healthier organizations that offer better products and services, and where ordinary people thrive. That's what matters.
Every organization is unique in how it was built and what it aims for. We run our organizations, and we are judged on what matters to us — our customers, employees, and other stakeholders.
So for us one thing is non-negotiable: the agentic shift happens on our terms and optimizes for what we care about — not on the terms of AI vendors and the hype around AI models.
What we shift toward
Product engineering organizations that hold on to sustainable quality, customer value and high adaptability make the following strategic shifts, with AI as a lever to ease them:
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specialistscraftspeople
Enabling product engineers to shift from narrow, assembly-line specialists to end-to-end craftspeople — with AI filling the specialist gaps and offering upskilling for entering new domains.
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proxiesusers
Ending the telephone game through manager-proxies and the era of “IT sitting in the basement” — instead putting product engineers at zero distance with the customers and users, to empathize, analyze, and synthesize firsthand.
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outputoutcomes
Elevating product engineers from being measured by output to owning the complete value loop — ensuring real customer impact, experimenting and course-correcting as the evidence comes in.
These shifts are not new. They were well documented and recommended long before the current AI wave. AI does not change why these shifts matter. It makes them more feasible, more relevant and more urgent.
Now, which shifts your organization takes on is yours to decide. What matters is that they are strategic, not shortsighted — that they serve the organization you want to have in years rather than the numbers FOMO would have you chase this quarter.
What we refuse to accept
The frontier labs optimize for the adoption of their products, and FOMO is the strongest lever they pull on us. That is a legitimate business strategy, perhaps, but it is theirs, not ours.
To keep the shift healthy, whatever the hype says, there are three things we will not trade for short-term gains:
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lost judgmentefficiency
We do not equate the loss of judgment — in code, design, architecture, features, value or taste — with efficiency.
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vendor dependenceprogress
We do not accept dependence on AI vendors — their models, tooling and proposed lifecycles — as progress.
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output volumecapability
We do not mistake more output — more code, features or tokens — for a more capable organization.
In short, we do not let AI hype crowd out long-term thinking about our organizations and what is good for our people and businesses. So we say: “Org design, then AI.” We start from the shifts above, then use AI, and other means, to make them real.
What's Next?
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