Thinking in public
Notes on how AI changes operating models, why APIs become business capabilities, and what helps product and engineering organisations move faster.
We're currently prepping for the MRI Ascend conference in APAC. It's made me think back to the most valuable professional development course I’ve ever done. It came completely out of left field. It was a storytelling course.
When generative AI and the frontier LLMs started to become practical, I pushed every team in my portfolio to build an AI feature. I wasn't stressed about what they were building, but I pushed hard to get them all to build something. This wasn't because I thought adding on an AI feature would change the business or even make us money. In fact, we never charged customers for any of them as an added feature. I did this for the sole purpose of forcing people to engage with this new technology.
A long time ago, way back when I still had hair, Microsoft introduced Team Foundation Server and one of the productivity metrics commonly reported on was lines of code written per developer. At the time, it seemed like a relevant metric. More code meant more output, no?