Author: Neal
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Getting going with AI team mates
Notes from a recent SpaceX talk about using bots in your team. This talk again tallies with the notion of using AI / bots to free up work so that humans can work on more strategic and creative work. From reactive work to meaningful work Meaningful work is often bottlenecked by routine, reactive tasks such…
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Is AI Saving Useful Time for Product Teams?
Atlassian’s State of Product 2026 reveals a gap between faster work and better outcomes. Flying blind (Still). The promise of AI is compelling: spend less time on routine work and more on strategy, experimentation and understanding customers. This is what our own research showed. Yet Atlassian’s State of Product 2026 suggests that promise remains unfinished.…
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Agentic Central Teams
“It’s really critical to say that nobody knows where this is going” Tarik Shaukat, CEO Sonar. Sonar has proposed one of the more interesting approaches to AI-cnetric / AI-Native development and it helps to start the conversation about how to plan our work with AI Native teams. Context How do you get stuff done? Up…
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What do teams actually want AI to do?
The readiness gap is already here! The starting point for our research. According to a study by Notion, 60% of leaders believe their team is ready for AI. Only 30% of teams feel the same. The business case is clear: leaders want high producivity. But does that convince teams? Most teams right now still experience AI…
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Work starts on the first AI Native Team Transformation
Until now most of the teams I was dealing with were adding AI into their ways of working. This would be ‘Level 1’ or ‘Level 2’ according Notion’s AI transformation model. This is the first time for me to support a team that was undergoing a full AI transformation – so Level 3, which has…
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How to Build Team Collaboration When Working with External Contractors
From the Hotline: “I work in a company where there are a lot of external contractors. There are very strict rules. Internal employees cannot dictate which meetings they should attend. If they come … great! But they might now. The external contractors are from different companies, and they consider each other as competition.“ I’ve been…
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What’s the difference between a kickoff and a Liftoff?
Question from the hotline: A room, a deck, people gazing into their laptops, with a few polite nods when looking up at the slides, and then the hour’s up, everyone disappears into the next meeting. It’s not uncommon! We’ve seen $1m projects kicked off like this in an hour. A Team Liftoff takes a different…
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How To Answer the Question: So What Will You Do In The First Two Weeks?
This was a tough question I was once asked in an interview. He wanted to know what was I going to do upon starting this new engagement. So I gave an answer of all the things I would do in the first two weeks. I’d understand the context, get a feel for the environment, conduct…
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Escape Velocity and Coherence
“If you want to go to the moon, you’ve got to be able to not only have the escape velocity to get there, you also need an airtight container so that you don’t asphyxiate on the way there.” Nice quote from polymath Andres Gomez Emilson in reference to trying to find a solution to universal…