The Four Ps — A Leadership Framework: How to Manage An AI-Native Engineering Team
What should an engineering leader such as a VP Engineering or an Engineering manager do to help their team become more proficient in AI?
Dear friends,
What should an engineering leader such as a VP Engineering or an Engineering manager do to help their team become more proficient in AI? I speak regularly with engineering leaders, and want to share some effective practices. If you’re starting a new team of 2-3 persons, you can start with exclusively AI-native people, but many large companies have to find ways to move existing teams forward. The goal is not a traditional engineering team that uses AI, but rather an AI-native engineering team that is designed to take advantage of AI’s capabilities and work around its bottlenecks.
People. First, support individual development. Teams are made up of people, and for it to be AI-native, its individuals have to be proficient in the technology and its use. Encourage your team to become skilled at AI Engineering, provide space and budget for experimentation, and set a culture that encourages this growth. Additionally, many engineering leaders are themselves hands-on builders or have returned to being more hands-on since coding agents have made it easier. You can’t know what it feels like to ride a bicycle just by watching others do it; you have to hop on a bike yourself. And you can’t know what it feels like to steer a coding agent or build and deploy AI systems unless you’re at least occasionally doing it yourself. So take the time to build your own projects. The intuitions you develop will improve your judgement on both technical and business decisions.
Projects. Execute promising projects. As I’ve written previously, we should invest in bottom-up innovation. However, additional top-down backing of a handful of promising projects is important for them to scale and show business impact. Engineering leaders who understand AI technology better than other business functions do have a critical role to play in helping companies select these projects. Far too many businesses are still thinking of AI as primarily a way to increase efficiency and save costs. Yes, it can do that, but the opportunities to create new products and find new ways to serve users — and drive growth — are far larger, so in your mix of projects, please include some ideas for growth!
Platforms. Invest in infrastructure to enable AI use. Organize your data to make it easy for developers to get their agents the relevant context and take appropriate actions. I find the work to be done in this area varies significantly by organization, but it might involve — with appropriate security and governance — making repositories visible to agents, setting up documentation such as product design decisions and support tickets to be accessible to agents, other data infrastructure work to make your data agent-ready, and creating internal tools for agents to use. You might also set up AI code review tools, CI pipelines to help agents debug and deploy, infrastructure for agents to run on (like sandboxes, or maybe just a lot of Mac minis), and ways to codify and share reusable agent skills. Or for some businesses, the first step may be to persuade the CIO that it’s high time to let your developers stop coding exclusively by hand and use agents. That, too, would be progress!
Processes. Redesign processes around AI’s new bottlenecks. On most of my teams, engineers help shape the build by participating in product management decisions, and sometimes also in marketing, design, etc. The cost of building software to a clear spec has fallen dramatically, making everything else seem like a bottleneck in comparison. A skilled team that either knows, or can figure out, what to build can get the job done quickly, if we let them. So form high-context, high-empowerment teams that have the information they need and are empowered to act (subject to modest safeguards against significant risks, like leaking confidential data, a major outage, or data loss). We still have the age-old problem of coordinating among individuals and teams — we want to empower people to move quickly, while keeping teams aligned in building toward a greater whole. Practices here are still emerging, but getting different teams’ agents to share information with each other is a promising direction.
Whatever your position, I hope this framework of People, Projects, Platforms, and Processes helps you move your organization forward. And if you have a boss who you’d like to partner with to implement such changes, consider forwarding this email to them!
Keep building!
Andrew
