I don’t post here often, but over the last few months leading Quality, Automation, and Developer Enablement at LinkedIn, one shift has become clear, and I thought I should share it with you: The half-life of project value has shrunk. In an AI-accelerated ecosystem, a project that delivers impact only at the end of a long cycle carries real risk. By the time you ship, the landscape may have changed., external tools improve, and the problem may no longer make sense to be solved in the same way. Execution alone is no longer sufficient. There’s also an organizational effect. The longer teams invest in a direction, the harder it becomes to pivot — especially when evaluation systems reward completion over learning. Rational people protect their impact. In this environment, incremental, compounding progress matters more. Shorter loops. Clear deltas. Room to change direction. AI accelerates building. It also accelerates irrelevance. Leadership has to account for both. #thoughtfortheday
This is so true and specially when standardizing AI tooling. AI-scape is evolving rapidly specially in the context of Dev Ex teams (eg., Intuit’s AppFabric). Often, by the time an internal tool is fully productionized, other org developers have already moved on to creating/adopting newer solutions. Balaji, but this raises a genuine q– beyond provisioning licenses and accelerating access to external AI (Claude, Cursor, et al), what is the next high-value true-north for modern new-age Dev ex teams? If the market solves the tooling problem faster, where should a company be directing their Dev ex teams’ engineering cycles for "compounding progress"? I did brainstorm about this a lot with leaders while my time at LI, a very interesting challenge.
I totally agree and I would say this concept held true even before the rapid adoption of AI in front of us today, but AI certainly does make it more critical. Now, you want to deliver something quick and of value in a short timeframe: can you please talk to someone to allow users to set their default sort setting for viewing comments on a LI post, and then add “Least Recent” as an option?
Whats your guidance on Code-Reviews ? What are the best practices to get that faster. Willing to learn how others are thinking.
And this will necessitate smaller teams aka fewer people but require those people to be far far more efficient than they currently are. Good luck on all fronts! You and your team have exciting but not easy jobs for sure!!!
So true. The technology is getting commoditized. Culture will play a huge role.
This was, of course, the original motivation of agile v waterfall. Sometimes those first principles are forgotten and adherence to a process takes over.
Balaji Srinivasan So in practice for Eng teams what does that translate to? Shorter sprints? Or smaller more iterative features?