G to the Square

Organisations and workplaces are like a hydroelectric dam: all the input, such as raw materials, infrastructure, code, sales, and customer service. The go through the dam and produces something people pay for.

Everything cracks under pressure. Relationships crack, houses crack, your car will crack, your health, the environment. The more pressure, the more visible the cracks. All workplaces have cracks, and AI is amplifying them by applying pressure, by making want to move fast us and sometimes succeeding, however eventually the pressure is to much and some dams will crumble.

Tech companies and startups are feeling it. Code is cheap to produce now; however, the process around the final product is expensive: design, product syncs, code reviews, and testing. AI hasn’t helped there, instead it has only augmented the cracks in the process around development. So what do we do? Build more guards? Build a dam in front of the dam?

Remember when a web developer (or webmaster) wasn’t just a JavaScript or Frontend Developer, but also could sysadmin, do backend, design, and graphic design? After the financial crisis, specialization became a thing. We got frontend developers and agile coaches, which then led to product owners and UX designers, which evolved into today’s product teams.

I’d argue that great design is priceless¹; however, good design is so cheap these days with so many component libraries and AI picking patters, that with some sense of aesthetics, one person can produce lead to a nice-looking product. Because at the end of the day, functionality and substance win all the day and you product the uniqueness of it and relief it provides, is the brand that sticks.

Let me be blunt: blow down the whole damn dam.

Let everybody wear multiple hats: product, design, QA, and engineer. We need a new business model: Freemium 5.0. You’re a free user? You get a canary release². You don’t want things to break? Well, pay. Free users get the latest and some bugs, while paying customers get the true, tried, and tested. No staging, no more process of QA. Build tools, linters, tests, and let code reviews focus on quality. Tear it down, let it flow and learn to surf instead.