Brian Balfour: belief

Transcript context

…That is incredibly interesting. I'm glad we went there. I have a newsletter post coming out soon, probably before this episode, that touches on a lot of advice along these lines. I am excited for you guys to keep seeing these insights into companies and sharing more of this because this is I think what a lot of people are looking for, just like things aren't quite clicking at our company. We keep hearing everyone just getting so much more productive. All these companies are running more efficiently and it's not working here. I think that's the kind of advice a lot of people are looking for, so thank you for sharing all that. Brian, is there anything else that you wanted to touch on? Anything else you wanted to leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? Well, actually, just a couple more points on this topic we should go. There's probably two more things I would say about this. One is that, if you're a CEO listening to this, I would say that most CEOs or most executives are incredibly disconnected from the actual AI adoption taking place inside their companies. I think a lot of executives who have done these decrees and all that kind of stuff think it's happening naturally, but we talked to both groups. We talked to tons of end users and we talked to tons of executives. The story we hear from the end users, the PMs, the eng, all that kind of stuff that we talk to using all this stuff, one of the main questions we ask them is, if we're talking to somebody who's picked up a prototyping tool, say, "Well, how many other people on the product and design team are using this?" Almost 90% of the time it's like, "Ah, it's me and this one other person," and everybody else hasn't taken it up. So there's a huge disconnect. We heard one story, and I can't say the name, but it's a company we all know. It's a major tech company, a tech-forward company. CEO's been out there talking about being AI-native. We talked to one of their principal PMs. Person was early to the prototyping tools. This person shared a prototype with the designer, the eng manager. The designer and eng manager escalated it to the VPs. It caused this whole conversation. Month later, it was still stalling out. This PM happened to then attend a happy hour where the CEO was at and approached the CEO and told the CEO about the experiment that they were running with prototyping and stuff, and the CEO was like, "This is fantastic. Where is it at right now?" He was like, "Oh, well, X, Y, Z happened." The CEO had no idea. And then the CEO is like, "Okay, let me take care of it," and then the next day, it happened. So one is that you have to go to the ground floor on this stuff. Some of the best companies like Shopify and others are measuring actual adoption and usage. They've gone to the extreme on that front to get a bunch of signals and close to the ground. It just goes to show that this is... I don't think we want to talk about going founder mode, but the reality is it's not just about getting into the weeds of your product, but with something this sizable, you got to get into the weeds of the transformation to really understand what's going on and adopt it. That's point number one. The second point I would say is Fareed, we do this podcast called Unsolicited Feedback, Fareed Mosavat had this great quote on it. He was like, "Look, your output is constrained by the slowest part of your system." That stuck in my head because it's absolutely true. If you think about AI adoption as a system, there's all parts of the system that could be slowing adoption. It might be that people don't feel permission or they don't have the budget or they don't have the knowledge, all these types of things. there's all parts of the system that could be slowing adoption. It might be that people don't feel permission or they don't have the budget or they don't have the knowledge, all these types of things. In a lot of these cases, it's things like IT, legal, procurement are the slowest part of the friction and are setting the pace of all of this output. You can also see this in just product teams. There's been all this talk about product managers are becoming the new bottleneck because engineers are speeding up. Well, that's because people are speeding up one part of the product system and not the other parts, which makes sense. They adopted all of this tooling for engineers because they're the biggest head count and the most expensive and all that type of stuff, but product is an output of design, PMs, and engineering. The system is there not to produce code, it's to ship product, and shipping product is the function of those three things. If you just accelerate one part of the system, you're just going to move to the bottleneck to another part and your actual product output, the output of the system doesn't accelerate, either. I think people have to really understand those two things: what is actually happening on the ground floor, and what is the slowest part? What is the thing that is causing the slowest part of the adoption? Just attack them ruthlessly if you're really serious about making this transition.…

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