TBM 417: Before You Fire All Your Glue People Because of AI
The article warns against indiscriminately firing "glue people"—those who handle coordination, judgment, and informal knowledge—by assuming AI can replace their work. It explains that AI excels at automating repetitive, friction‑laden tasks but fails to capture the nuanced decision‑making, trust‑building, and social navigation these roles provide. The author proposes a heuristic: apply AI only when the primary barrier is time or tooling, and use a capability‑opportunity‑motivation lens to assess suitability. Misusing AI can hollow out essential functions, leaving organizations with artifacts but no underlying capability to act on them.
TBM 416: Investment Stewardship (As Habit)
The article argues that measuring engineering ROI is less about precise formulas and more about cultivating a continuous stewardship habit. Companies often rely on vanity metrics like revenue per engineer, but true insight comes from leading indicators, disciplined hiring, and...
TBM 402: The Real-World Journey to Value and Product-Centricity
In this episode the host maps a non‑linear journey that organizations take from focusing solely on delivery predictability to becoming truly product‑centric and value‑driven. The discussion walks through five narrative "acts"—starting with reducing work‑in‑progress and improving flow, then layering early...