Design for the velocity you’re about to create
We set a public and very specific goal: double R&D productivity in 12 months. It was uncomfortable, and there were stretches where I wasn’t sure we would make it. But a number that aggressive forced everyone to accept that incremental improvement wasn’t going to get us there, and we had to take apart old ways of working while the technology underneath was still maturing. We hit the goal inside the year, and output has kept climbing ever since.
What I underestimated was how fast the bottleneck would move downstream. Once engineering sped up, the constraint moved to go to market. Every release still needs documentation, enablement content, briefings for customer success, and customers who are ready for what’s coming, and for a while we were shipping faster than any of that could keep up. We now treat go to market as its own automated phase of the life cycle, with the same agent-driven approach we applied to code and testing, and a simple rule that nothing ships until the rest of the organization can support it. If I were starting over, I would build that capacity from day one instead of finding out about it the hard way.
The real transformation is organizational
The tools matter, but everyone can buy the same tools. What we actually did over these 18 months was redesign the system around AI: the way work flows between teams, the governance that lets people trust the output, the small set of tools we committed to, and a target aggressive enough to force all of it. Any one of those alone would have produced another interesting pilot. Together they produced a different engineering organization.
