Entry 10- On Team Performance in an AI world

AI sucks, long live AI!

In this brand new world, we now need to optimize for AI with a firm understanding of it's limitations, especially the human components.

I began my entry into this new startup with the learning from the past in how to best organize teams, work with people and glean non-obvious learnings from user interviews, Now many of those people I work with are using AI with intermittent scrutiny, including myself. Therein lies the rub, where before we needed to engage in deep thinking and hope we were able to cover all of the critical corner cases, we now need to produce twice as much in half the time and make sure we spare some time for real thinking. This can be both exciting and irksome, often on the same day. The question, when to spare the time for real deep thinking and when to move as fast as possible and I propose it's impossible to really do both.

So, what did I learn today with these musings?

Well, the old processes don't work so well anymore. Today's world demands much lighter weight processes with intentional space for moving fast safely while retaining the time for deeper thinking, and this marks the first day of this new process experiment where I kinda sorta pair worked with the dev.

We started the day scrutinizing the ticket and coming up with an action plan. It felt good, we actually eliminated a bunch of work doing this and optimized the story the day of. The old way would have had me meeting with the whole team in one or multiple grooming sessions where most of the attendees were completely disengaged, either just waiting for something relevant to them or waiting for their name to be called out to pay attention.

New paradigm, small short meetings with only the immediate stakeholders (me and one or two devs in this case) to keep us feeling like a team. Way fewer team meetings (one 45 min meeting a week) and way more asynch collab in slack.

Surprisingly this makes it feel like a well balanced team that is also able to move super fast safely. We'll see how it goes over the coming weeks :)

So, what does this actually have to do with AI...very little except it's magnified the root cause of some process issues and allowed something more streamlined and engaging to take it's place. Somehow I feel it actually opens more space for us to be more human, but more on that later :)