Strategic insights on technology leadership, engineering culture, and building great teams
Story points were never about complexity. They forced a conversation that used to be expensive, and AI planning made that conversation cheap. Which leaves the harder problem: which of the ceremony's other jobs were ever real, and how you commit to a date once the shield is gone.
Managers stop paying close attention to the people who look like they don't need it. The ones who keep paying attention often only ever name the gaps. Either way a high performer ends up with no idea what good looks like, or whether they are hitting it.
Individual AI productivity gains are real. But they're not compounding at team or org level — and the popular fixes (AI in the docs, AI in the calls) miss the point entirely. You can solve information. You can't solve alignment with a transcript.