Author
Antoine Buteau

Antoine Buteau

4 min read Free

Operating Structure for the AI Era #2: Smaller Teams, Broader Roles

AI makes smaller teams possible. It does not automatically make them better. This distinction matters because a lot of executive conversation is drifting toward a simplistic conclusion: if AI increases productivity, companies should need fewer people. Sometimes yes. But smaller teams only work when roles become broader, ownership becomes clearer,
5 min read Free

Operating Structure for the AI Era #1

Most AI org conversations start in the wrong place. They start with tools. Who has access? Which model should we buy? Should we allow agents? Should there be an AI champion in every department? Should we form a central AI team? Those questions matter, but they are downstream. The first-
Profile 9 min read Free

Lessons from Andrew Gils

Andrew Gils is a pioneering systems engineer and entrepreneur best known for bridging the gap between open-source telecom architecture and high-end digital audio hardware. Through his work developing embedded operating systems and founding ventures dedicated to specialized server hardware, he has demonstrated how lean, purpose-built technologies can
2 min read Free

Shipping velocity series #10: The Shipping System Audit

You have a team. They're working hard. They're not shipping as fast as they should. The diagnosis matters more than the prescription. Most teams treat "ship faster" as a universal instruction: work harder, work smarter, add process, remove process. It rarely works because it&
2 min read Free

Shipping velocity series #9: How AI Changes Shipping Velocity — and What It Doesn't Fix

The promise is compelling: AI compresses the mechanical work of coding, prototyping, writing, and designing. Teams that integrate it well can produce more viable options in the same time. The cost of a first draft goes down. The speed of iteration goes up. This is substantially true. And it creates
2 min read Free

Shipping velocity series #8: Quality vs Speed Is Usually the Wrong Tradeoff

The framing is familiar: you can ship fast or you can ship quality. Pick one. It's treated as a fundamental tradeoff, like speed versus fuel efficiency in a car. You can have more of one but less of the other. Teams pick their position on the spectrum and
2 min read Free

Shipping velocity series #7: Platform Engineering Helps, But It Won't Save a Slow Product System

Developer productivity has become a discipline. Platform engineering has become a function. Internal developer tools, paved roads, golden paths, better CI/CD, observability infrastructure — there's real value here. Slow local setup times, flaky tests, painful deploys, and opaque production behavior are genuine drag on throughput, and teams that
2 min read Free

Shipping velocity series #6: There Is Always a Constraint. Stop Optimizing Everything Else.

Open any sprint retrospective notes from a functioning product team and look for the themes. "We need faster CI." "Design review is a bottleneck." "We need more product bandwidth for specs." "QA is always backed up." "We don't have

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