Companies Should Stop Obsessing Over AI Tools And Do This Instead
Good culture is by far a better productivity hack than a shiny new AI tool!
Intro
It’s becoming quite common these days for companies to put so much effort into using shiny new AI tools. But they forget what’s actually important.
In today’s article, you can expect to learn why companies shouldn’t focus so much on just AI tools and focus on a LOT more impactful things.
Things that make the real difference between being a successful company and not.
This is an article for paid subscribers, and here is the full index:
- Visual/Audio Version of the Article
- There Are Many Unrealistic Expectations Coming From Company Leaders
- There Is No Better Productivity Hack Than A Great Culture
- The Speed of Writing Code Has Never Been an Issue
- I’ve Seen Too Many Bad Processes
- Focus on Building the RIGHT Things
🔒 Too Many People Leave the Company Because of Bad Management
🔒 Poor Decision-Making Across the Company
🔒 Too Much Politics Games and Not Enough “Getting Things Done”
🔒 Tolerating Low-Performers
🔒 Last words
Visual/Audio Version of the Article
You can watch/listen to the video below, or you can keep reading for the complete overview and insights of today’s topic!
There Are Many Unrealistic Expectations Coming From Company Leaders
Let’s first discuss a bit about what’s happening in our industry, especially in engineering organizations. It’s the unrealistic expectations of company leaders.
I’m seeing and I’m hearing that a lot from different engineers and also engineering leaders across the industry. I’ve personally seen a lot of these.
I’ve noted this down already in the article How AI Is Impacting Engineering Leadership, but here are some of the unrealistic expectations I am hearing and seeing:
Believing AI is a “Plug and Play” solution
Expecting AI to eliminate all manual work
Underestimating the cost and complexity of building internal LLMs
Assuming AI will just magically understand the whole context of the specific domain
Expecting AI to replace entire teams
Assuming AI will just work without failures
Thinking that there are no ethical, legal, and security risks
Assuming AI will exponentially increase the performance over time
Additionally, what is quite common these days, and what I often hear, is that CEOs or other company leaders attempt to do some kind of vibe coding of their company’s website homepage and then tell engineers how easy it is to build with an AI tool.
This is the main reason why engineering leaders also perceive AI in a negative way, and also engineering teams are less motivated these days.
A lot of companies have an excessive focus on pure AI tools, but in reality, such an obsession can backfire.
There Is No Better Productivity Hack Than A Great Culture
That’s really important to keep in mind, but many companies today forget about it, which is unfortunate, because that’s where real productivity comes from.
Acquiring a shiny new AI tool without focusing on a great culture won’t mean much. If the culture is bad, people won’t be motivated, they won’t be driven, and they’ll look elsewhere.
But when people feel valued and see that they can grow inside a company → they are excited to do the work and will also put their best effort. Always keep this in mind.
And unfortunately, a lot of leaders these days are putting too much effort into the wrong things. Let’s get to that next.
The Speed of Writing Code Has Never Been an Issue
If you’re using an AI tool like Cursor, Claude Code, or similar, they are going to be able to write code for you if you use their Agent mode.
But the thing is:
The speed of writing code has never been an issue.
The overall bottleneck has always been:
Bad processes
Building the WRONG things
Bad management
Poor decision-making
Too much politics games
Tolerating low-performers
Writing code has never been a bottleneck for creating Software.
So, instead of trying to obsess over something that doesn’t even have that much of an impact, focus on the things mentioned above.
We’ll go over one by one next.
I’ve Seen Too Many Bad Processes
The problem I see way too often is that many unnecessary meetings steal everyone’s focus time. Especially important for engineers to have a lot of uninterrupted time to focus.
When you feel you don’t need to be there → your energy gets drained, and you have none left for doing great work.
Instead of trying to write code faster, focus on improving the overall process.
Better processes mean:
more focus time,
productive meetings,
fewer unnecessary discussions,
clear action items,
ownership, and
empowering people in your teams.
That’s how the real work gets done.
Focus on Building the RIGHT Things
This is far more important than just typing faster or producing more code.
You can write 10,000 or 20,000 lines of code, but if you are building the wrong thing for the user, it means nothing → you’re wasting your time, the company’s time, and you are creating code that still needs to be maintained.
Once you know you’re building the right things, then you can bring in AI tools or whatever else you want to speed up the delivery.
That’s the biggest bottleneck for many teams:
Shipping features that customers don’t actually need → end up wasting huge amounts of time.
There’s a reason why I like to say that a good engineer thinks like a product manager. Our goal is to create solutions that customers are going to love.
And I like to say:
You can create the best technical solution, but if it does not solve customers’ problems, it will not be perceived that way.