I’m seeing big wins with AI, but not at the product level. I’m excited about the progress, though maybe I should be questioning our priorities more.

There is so much hype around AI and using it to move faster that the extreme focus on ‘product’ and prioritizing ‘impact’ has greatly relaxed. For the first time in my entire career, I’m able to prioritize addressing technical debt and friction in our SDLC processes.

Normally, these types of changes get bundled in with regular product work and cause timelines to grow. Nobody paid down technical debt unless it came due and was no longer optional.

I am using AI to address tech debt, but these are all things I identified as problems - and big improvements - long before AI was a regular tool in the toolbox. I just could never demonstrate how addressing them early would pay off in the long run through faster project turnaround. Fixing known issues simply doesn’t rank against new features when it comes to prioritization.

Anyway, I’m thankful to finally get to fix these things, and our ticket-to-deployment time is going way down - but none of this matters if ‘product’ doesn’t streamline their goals and priorities as well.

Similar here, the issue that I'm having a hard time getting across to leadership is: internal users and customers do not want so much change thrown at them. Totally get the 2 person startup thing trying to build something greenfield first time, big hurry, etc. That does not translate to what companies with existing customers and not scrambling for product market fit need though.