What we stand for
The agentic shift is real. It affects our organizations deeply, changing how we think about the work and the workers.
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 organizations that offer better products and services. That's what matters.
Everyone is optimizing for something. 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, and it is theirs, not ours.
Every organization is unique in the way it was built and in what it aspires to. 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.
What we refuse to accept
By practicing critical thinking, we claim:
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lost judgmentefficiency
We do not treat the loss of judgment of code, design, architecture, features, value as efficiency.
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vendor dependenceprogress
We do not accept dependence on AI vendors, their models and tooling, as progress.
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output volumecapability
We do not confuse the ability to generate output with a strategic organizational capability.
In short, we do not let a shallow AI-adoption fad crowd out our long-term thinking about the organizations we are building. So we say: “Org design, then AI.” We learn to act strategically: we define what we want to shift in our organizations for the greater good, and then we apply AI — and other means — to make those shifts real.
What we shift towards
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 AI. What AI changes is not whether they are right — only how hard they are to make.
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's Next?
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