AI Isn’t Replacing Jobs—It’s Replacing Excuses

When AI first started making waves in product and engineering circles, I thought the impact would be obvious:

✅ Fewer engineers.
✅ Smaller teams.
✅ Cheaper builds.

But as with most technological revolutions, the first-order assumptions were wrong. Dead wrong.

What’s actually happened over the past year is something far more profound—and honestly, far more interesting.

The Real Impact: Productivity, Not Downsizing

Instead of shrinking our team, AI has expanded our expectations.
I no longer expect engineers to work faster just to hit deadlines. I expect them to work faster because they can. With the right tools and AI support, productivity isn’t 10% better—it’s 2x or 3x better.

And that shift changes everything.

Our roadmap hasn’t shrunk.
It’s grown.
More ambition, not less.
More opportunity, not fewer resources.

Same Teams, Bigger Expectations

We haven’t downsized.
But our bar for output? Sky-high.

Velocity has become unrecognisable. Things that used to take days now take hours. Problems that once needed multiple syncs are resolved in a few Slack messages (or by a code-gen AI with better recall than any human).

But with all this newfound speed comes a trap that most teams don’t see coming.

The Trap: Overbuilding

Here’s where it gets spicy.
With all this extra capacity, many companies are making a subtle but dangerous mistake:

They’re building too much.

More features.
More edge cases.
More “cool ideas” shipped into production before they’ve earned their place.

It’s tempting. When you can build something in a day that used to take a week, why wouldn’t you?
But velocity without discipline leads to chaos.

More output means more maintenance. More complexity. More customer confusion.

AI Makes Output Easier—But Focus Harder

And this is the silent killer:
AI has lowered the cost of execution, but raised the cost of prioritisation.

The companies that thrive in this new era won’t be the ones with the most features—they’ll be the ones with the clearest focus.

They’ll pick one valuable job-to-be-done, and they’ll relentlessly pursue excellence in that area.
Everything else? Cut ruthlessly.

The Future Belongs to the Focused

The real winners in the age of AI won’t be faster.
They’ll be sharper.
They’ll ship less, but it’ll matter more.
They’ll trade "more" for "better."

And the rest?

They’ll drown in their own output—death by a thousand product updates.