Tom O'Neill

This isn’t just faster dev. It’s faster everything. There’s something happening right now in the design systems space that’s worth your attention, especially if you care about shipping real product faster, with less handoff and less guesswork. I’ve been experimenting with a lot lately with various workflows that connects Figma's MCP server to our internal design system (Altitude) using Cursor. The results are hard to ignore. → Figma component selected → Code generated using our tokens, variants, and structure → Functional, testable, fully coded component in minutes But that’s only half the story. The second half is where things get really interesting. I built a Storybook UI Generator that runs a local MCP server, talks to the codebase, and lets non-devs create and update UIs using natural language prompts. That’s the jump from dev to product, from coded to customized. It’s not just faster handoff. It’s faster everything. This setup creates two accelerations: → One from design to dev → Another from dev to product-ready UI The whole thing is still early. There are no benchmarks yet. But the signal is strong, and the impact feels real. I pulled together some thoughts and all the demos here: 👉 https://lnkd.in/gEBciwFD If you’re building design systems, front-end infrastructure, or any kind of internal tools, this is worth testing. Don’t overthink it. Pick a simple setup or plug it into something you’re already using. Just try it. #designsystems #ai

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📃 🧠 Documentation is a secret goldmind for tribal knowledge!! I talk a lot about tribal knowledge, not only because it comes up in nearly every customer call, but because I think it's the most interesting problem out there today that I believe we can solve with technology. Everyone in manufacturing wants to capture tribal knowledge. But the real question is: where should it live? Most teams overlook the obvious answer: documentation. We polled dozens of engineers and technicians to get a sense of what types of tribal knowledge was out there, undocumented. Unsurprisingly, people had a lot to say! Check out Quarter20 Inc.'s latest blog post (link in comments) as part of our work instructions series to read about our poll, the risks that you're vulnerable to today, and how to mitigate them.

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Misinformation isn’t a strategy. Customer outcomes are. The B2B landscape is littered with companies trying to win through spin instead of substance. But here’s the thing: customers aren’t fooled. If your product delivers, customers stay. If it doesn’t, they leave. It’s that simple. At Billtrust, we don’t need to play defense because our customers—and the data—do the talking. 📊 91% of G2 reviews score us a 4 or 5 out of 5. 📊 Enterprises are switching to Billtrust because they’ve experienced the alternative. 📊 The best marketing isn’t what you say—it’s what your customers say after working with you. The real competitive advantage isn’t marketing narratives. It’s customer trust. And trust is built through innovation, transparency, and delivering on promises—not rewriting reality. Read Becky Carr's take on why the high road isn’t just the right choice—it’s the winning one. #highroad

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📅 Today at revAlation Chicago, we’re unveiling Alation Agent Builder— enabling you to build accurate, configurable, governed, metadata-aware agents. Prototypes are easy. Accuracy and trust are hard. Especially with structured data, where even a small error in a query or filter can break trust. Agent Builder helps teams: 🚀 Reach 90%+ accuracy before deployment with built-in evaluation tools 🛠️ Build agents with no code and prebuilt templates 🤝 Connect to 100+ data sources and apps 🏢 JLL is already using it to power intelligent lease decisions with trusted data (and they're speaking at revAlation today!). https://lnkd.in/g58AeF7u

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It happens often. Bellwood gets brought in to build version 2.0 of a product where the "MVP" is a little too "Minimum" and not quite "Viable". Here's some lessons from the battlefront, and some thoughts on "how to invest wisely the first time". https://lnkd.in/eCuu_tHc

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Dangerous advice in tech is "Do things that don't scale." Look, I get the intention. But at Cal.com, Inc., we learned this the hard way. We once built custom features for early clients. Guess what happened? - Features became maintenance nightmares. - Clients became overly dependent. - Product became more complex. Your early decisions compound faster than you think. What starts as "just one custom feature" becomes technical debt that slows down your entire roadmap. Better advice? Build scalable systems from day one. Trust me on this one- future you will thank me.

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