Alignment is the hidden reason most leaders fail. I help them fix it for good.

Most leaders I meet are insecure overachievers. They carry expectations that are heavier than they look.

When alignment breaks, even the most capable teams lose momentum.

I help product and engineering leaders fix what is really breaking their teams. Misalignment. Together we restore clarity, alignment and momentum so their teams perform at their best without burning out.

What I know about you:
→ You are a senior product or engineering leader with commercial responsibility
→ You are solving harder problems with more eyes on you than ever
→ You are juggling strategy, speed and stakeholder alignment
→ You want to lead with clarity and confidence while staying grounded

How I help tech leaders and their teams:
→ Build high performing, product led organisations
→ Develop leadership skills that grow their team and influence
→ Strengthen trust, alignment and effective ways of working
→ Navigate transitions such as reorgs, promotions or new leadership roles

Whether you are stepping into a new role or levelling up where you are, I help create the clarity and headspace you need to lead with intention.

Clients often say I help them pause and reflect, focus on what matters, and move forward with clarity and purpose.

I bring a mix of product leadership, coaching expertise and experience leading through high stakes transitions. I have helped teams grow through ambiguity, pressure and change.

A bit about my experience:
→ Helped more than 100 tech leaders navigate challenging transitions
→ Ranked #1 for Product Management and #3 for Management & Leadership on LinkedIn in the UK (Favikon)
→ Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC), trained Positive Intelligence Coach, ICF Member
→ Ex Pivotal Labs leader who guided teams through an IPO and two major acquisitions, first into VMware and later into Broadcom
→ International speaker and facilitator across Australia, the UK, Europe and the USA

Curious if I am the right fit for you or your team? Send me a message.

Someone called Steve Jobs an idiot.

On stage. With cameras rolling.

WWDC 1997.

An audience member tells Jobs he has no idea what he's talking about.

Questions his technical decisions.
Questions what he's been doing for seven years.

In front of hundreds of people.

Here's what Jobs does.

He nods through the insult.
He sits back down.
He takes a drink of water.

Then he says nothing.

For 11 seconds.

When he speaks, he opens with this:

"People like this gentleman are right. In some areas."

He concedes where the critic has a point.
He admits his own limitations.

Then he stands back up and reframes the entire conversation.

"You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology."

Nod. Sit. Pause. Concede. Reframe.

That sequence is conviction with restraint.

It's why he still had the room when he finished speaking.

I see this in the leaders I coach.

The ones who hold their ground know exactly why they made the call.

That clarity is what gives them the pause.

Also, got to love those black patch jeans. Peak '97.

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Liam Darmody

I use my 10+ years of experience building startups and enterprise products to help mission-driven product builders achieve impactful results. Alongside my current role where I lead a cross-functional team of product consultants at VMware Tanzu Labs, I am a Co-Active Coach in training and a Board Member of Product Management Festival. Drawing on my experience as the founding licensee of a TEDx event, co-founder of FitUsIn and the first product hire at Pivotal Labs Sydney, I infuse an entrepreneurial flair into my work as a coach, consultant and leader.

In 1997, Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy.

Steve Jobs came back and said four words.

"Marketing is about values."

Not features. Not specs.

Values.

He stood in front of his own employees.
And told them to stop talking about the product.

This was a company haemorrhaging money.
Products were behind.
The instinct would be to catch up.
Talk about what's new.
Prove you're competitive.

Jobs did the opposite.

He pointed to Nike.
Nike sells shoes.
They never talk about the shoe.
They never talk about air soles.
Or why they're better than Reebok.

They honour great athletes.
That's who they are.
That's what they stand for.

He pointed to "Got Milk?"
Twenty years telling people milk was good for them.
It didn't work.
Then they made you feel what it's like not to have it.
Sales went up.

Jobs looked at his team and said:

People with passion can change the world.
That's what Apple believes.
That's the whole message.

What people miss is that this wasn't a marketing decision.
It was a leadership one.

I see this with the leaders I work with.

The ones who talk about what their team does
get polite nods.

The ones who talk about what their team believes
get people leaning in.

One attracts transactions.
The other attracts believers.

I experienced this at Pivotal Labs.

We built software.
But that's not what people rallied around.

They rallied around the values.
How we worked. How we collaborated.

When we partnered with clients, it went deeper than software.
It was organisational change.
And that always starts with values too.

Jobs wasn't just launching an ad campaign.
He was doing something else at the same time.
He was giving 8,000+ people a reason to stay.

Most leaders default to talking about what their team does.
Features. Deliverables. Metrics.

The ones people follow talk about what they believe.

What's the belief your team would follow you for?

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A study compared the top 25 tennis players.

5 of them outlast the rest.

Simon Sinek asked what separated them.

Diet. Coaching. Work ethic.
All equal across the top 25.

The gap came down to one thing.

How they talked to themselves between points.

When the top 5 scored, they said "I love this game."
When they missed, they said "Wait till you see what I do next."

Those words changed what happened in their body.

Their heart rate dropped.
They preserved energy.
They stayed relaxed.

Point by point, it meant nothing.

But by the final set, they had compounded a physical edge built entirely from how they responded to each moment.

I've watched the same pattern in leadership.

Two leaders face the same setback.
Same missed target. Same difficult quarter.

One spirals. Replays the failure. Tightens up.
The other resets. Focuses on the next decision.

Over a week, the difference is invisible.

Over a year, one is burnt out and the other is still calm under pressure.

The gap between good and great is rarely about ability.

It is about what happens in the moments nobody sees.

Simon Sinek explains it better than I can.

What's the habit that compounds most in your role?

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Those who keep learning will keep rising in life.

It sounds obvious.
It isn't.

Munger constantly saw people rise who were far from the smartest in the room. Hard work alone didn't explain it either.

They were learning machines.

They went to bed every night a little wiser than when they woke up.

He would know. He read for hours every day, across every discipline he could find.

Most people read to collect. Munger read to think differently.

The leaders I work with who keep getting better have stopped chasing longer hours or the next certification.

They are paying attention. Reading widely. Asking better questions. Connecting ideas across disciplines.

I can always tell when someone has stopped. The language narrows. The references dry up. They start recycling the same three frameworks for every problem.

This is how compounding works outside of finance.
A little wiser today than yesterday.
Repeated for years.

It looks invisible on any given day.
But over a decade, the gap becomes enormous.

Munger was a 99-year-old man who stayed curious his entire life.

He made better decisions at 90 than most people make at 40.

Beyond talent. Beyond effort.

The discipline of staying curious when everyone around you has stopped.

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Most meetings reward the loudest voice.

Amazon designed the opposite.

Every Amazon meeting starts the same way.

Everyone sits down.
Nobody speaks.
For 30 minutes, they read.

Not a slide deck. Not bullet points.

A 6-page memo. Full sentences.
Narrative structure. Real arguments.

Then they discuss.

Jeff Bezos calls it "study hall."

Most people miss why they read in the room.

Bezos says executives bluff through meetings the same way high school kids bluff book reports.

Everyone is too busy to prepare.
So they nod along and improvise.

The memo read forces honesty.

You can't bluff when everyone in the room is reading the same document at the same time.

I saw a version of this at Pivotal Labs.

We ran large group sessions.
The default was big group discussions.

When we capped groups at 3-5 people, the quality changed.

Quieter voices showed up.
Insights surfaced that would have been buried in a bigger room.

The principle is the same.

Meetings default to rewarding confidence.
The loudest voice wins the room.
The best-prepared person stays quiet.

Bezos didn't ban PowerPoints because he dislikes presentations.

He banned them because slides let people hide behind bullet points instead of building real arguments.

A 6-page memo forces clarity.

You can't write six pages of structured narrative without thinking it through.

That's the real decision here.

A structural choice about how information flows and how teams make decisions.

Most meetings aren't designed. They happen.

Someone books a room. Opens a deck.
Talks until the time runs out.

The meeting that starts with silence is a meeting that starts with thinking.

What's the most effective meeting format you've used?

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The most limiting belief is:

"I already know."

Every time I've stretched myself into a new role and surrounded myself with people smarter than me, the same instinct kicks in.

Prove you belong.
Have the answer.
Be the one who knows.

Early in your career, that instinct might work.

It builds credibility. It earns trust. So it gets reinforced.

But at some point, it stops being useful and starts running on autopilot.

I've been that person in the room.

The one who stops asking questions because asking feels like admitting weakness.

There's a voice behind it. It sounds like high standards.

"You should already know this."
"Asking makes you look junior."
"You've earned your seat. Act like it."

It sounds like confidence. It's actually a saboteur.

I see it in the leaders I work with all the time.

Someone who built their reputation on expertise starts protecting it instead of expanding it.

The room gets quieter. Ideas dry up.

People stop saying "what if" because the response is already decided.

What looks like alignment is often resignation.

The hardest part is that this pattern disguises itself as strength. It feels earned. It feels deserved.

The first move is catching it.

Noticing the moment you stop being curious and start performing certainty.

Once you can see it, the rest follows:

→ Ask the question anyway, even when you think you know the answer.
→ Invite someone to challenge your thinking on a decision you've already made.
→ Name one assumption you're holding that might be outdated.

The leaders who keep growing treat experience as context, not conclusion.

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Microsoft was worth $300B when Nadella took over.

It's worth $3T now. One thing changed.

The culture.

When Nadella arrived in 2014, Microsoft ran on one rule: be the smartest person in the room. If you were wrong in a meeting, you lost standing. If you challenged the wrong person, you lost access.

So people did what made sense. They defended what they already knew. They built walls around their expertise instead of sharing it.

The whole company was trapped in certainty.

Nadella's fix wasn't a reorg or a product bet. He changed who gets rewarded. He stopped promoting the people with the best answers and started promoting the ones asking the best questions.

"The learn-it-all will always beat the know-it-all."

That wasn't a motivational poster. That was the actual operating shift. People who admitted what they didn't know started getting ahead of people who performed confidence.

And it worked. Microsoft went from stagnant to the most valuable company on earth.

I see the same tension in nearly every leadership team I work with.

The interesting thing is it scales down. What Nadella changed at a company level is the same shift individual leaders need to make. Expertise got you promoted. But past a certain point, your knowledge becomes the ceiling for your team.

If you want a learn-it-all culture, here's what that looks like in practice:

1. Ask one question in your next meeting that you genuinely don't know the answer to. Out loud. As the leader.

2. When someone brings you a problem, ask "what do you think?" before you give your view. Every single time.

3. Publicly credit someone who changed your mind. Name them. Say what you used to think and what you think now.

Small moves. But they signal something loud: it's safe to not know here.

That's what Nadella understood. Culture doesn't shift through memos. It shifts through what gets rewarded, day after day.

What's something you believed early in your career that you've since dropped?

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Most careers don't stall from lack of ability.

They stall waiting for permission.

I've watched it happen to smart people.

Someone gets the title, the scope, the team.
Everything they need to move.

And then they spend months treating that authority like something borrowed.

Checking with their boss.
Checking with peers.
Checking whether the thing they were hired to do is actually something they're allowed to do.

A Head of Product I worked with sat on a decision for three weeks.

They knew what they needed to do.
They just hadn't been told it was OK to make the call.

Three weeks. For a decision that was already theirs.

I see this pattern everywhere.

In both new leaders and experienced ones.

People who've been in the seat for years still looking over their shoulder before they act.

They have the information. What they're waiting for is a green light that already exists.

This is how decisions stall. How teams lose weeks. How capable people become bottlenecks without realising it.

The permission was never missing.

The recognition was.

Nobody is coming to tap you on the shoulder and say "you're allowed to lead now."

The wings are already yours.

What you do with them is the only question that matters.

What's the decision you've been sitting on that's already yours to make?

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I asked a team to name their top 3 priorities.

I got 11 different answers.

12 people.
11 different interpretations of what mattered most.

They weren't bad at their jobs.
They were good. Motivated. Busy.

But busy doing what?
That's the question nobody was asking.

They knew what to do today.
They could tell you their commitments, deadlines, and tasks. 

Ask them why those tasks mattered and you'd get a pause.

Ask them what the company's top priority was.
Every person in the room had a different answer.

This is the pattern.
Fortune 500s, scaleups, public sector.
The size changes. The gap doesn't.

The strategy exists. The alignment doesn't.
People know what they're doing. They can't tell you why.

Not because they don't care.
Because nobody connected the dots for them.

Wendy McGuinness called it the Strategy Pyramid.
9 layers from purpose to action:

🧭 Purpose: why do we exist?
1. Vision: What future are we building?
2. Mission: Why does this organisation exist?
3. Values: What do we stand for?

📑 Strategy: where are we going?
4. Priorities: What matters most right now?
5. Goals: What will we achieve?
6. Initiatives: What programs will drive progress?

⚙️ Execution: how do we get there?
7. Strategies: What approach will we take?
8. Tactics: What specific actions will we run?
9. Action Plan: Who does what, by when?

Most teams live at the bottom of this pyramid.

The work at the bottom and the purpose at the top look like two different conversations.

And the middle gets lost somewhere between the offsite and Monday morning.

Setting the strategy is the easy part.
Making it visible in the work. That's the job.

What would your team say if you asked them to name the top 3 priorities today?

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An infographic by Liam Darmody on The Strategy Pyramid: 9 Pillars From Purpose To Action For High Performing Organisations

Control feels like competence.

Until your team stops telling the truth.

Having every answer.
Filling every silence.
Running every decision through yourself.

It looks like high standards.
But it has a cost.

When a leader optimises for control, people learn what to hide.

They bring polished conclusions.
The rough thinking stays buried.
Ideas get challenged in corridors.
The meeting room stays polite.

They wait for permission before raising problems.

The leader ends up making decisions with half the information.

The team is strong enough.
They're just afraid of being the one who's wrong.

There's a difference between transparency and vulnerability.

Transparency is sharing information.
Vulnerability is admitting uncertainty.

One is a communication strategy.
The other is a leadership act.

I've watched this cost leaders their best people.

So what does vulnerability look like in a meeting?

It could look like this:

1. Saying "I don't know" in front of the team
2. Asking for help publicly, where the team can see
3. Changing your mind when new information arrives, and saying so

Brene Brown called it what it is:

"Vulnerability is not winning or losing. It's having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome."

That's the part most leaders skip.

The showing up before the outcome is clear.

Which of those three feels hardest for you?

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A portrait of Brené Brown with the following quote: "Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it's having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.”

A year ago we got married in Hawaii.

This week, our babymoon in Tenerife.

Babymoon, wedding anniversary, and Pippa's birthday. All in the same week.

Our usual holidays are all adventure. Our wedding and honeymoon were no exception. Hiking volcanoes. Swimming with turtles. Driving the Road to Hana.

Our babymoon in Tenerife was the opposite. Pool. Books. Long breakfasts. Walks along the beach. Chill dinners. Quiet nights.

It was probably the most relaxed holiday either of us has ever had, and will be for a long time to come.

With a baby arriving in a few months, this time next year is going to look very different.

I'm glad we got this one.

P.S. We did squeeze in one day exploring a volcano. Couldn't help ourselves 😅

Level 4 leaders build followers.

Level 5 leaders build successors.

Jim Collins studied what separated good companies from great ones. The answer kept coming back to one thing: the leader.

The best leaders share credit. They take blame.

And they build something designed to outlast them.

Collins called it the window and the mirror.

When things go well, they look out the window to credit others. When things go wrong, they look in the mirror to take responsibility.

Collins mapped leadership to five levels:

Level 1: Highly Capable Individual
↳ You contribute through talent, knowledge, and good work habits

Level 2: Contributing Team Member
↳ You work productively with others toward group goals

Level 3: Competent Manager
↳ You organise people and resources to achieve objectives

Level 4: Effective Leader
↳ You drive commitment to a compelling vision

Level 5: Executive
↳ You combine personal humility with fierce professional will

Most strong leaders plateau at Level 4.

They can inspire. They can execute. They can build followings.

But Level 5 requires a paradox.

Drive without ego. Ambition for the organisation, not yourself.

I've seen leaders move entire companies toward a vision. Then lose their best people because they could not resist claiming the result.

That is Level 4 with a ceiling.

Level 5 is the leader who makes the team feel like they did it themselves.

Collins found something else. All but one of his Good to Great leaders were promoted from within.

They were built, not bought.

The gap between 4 and 5 is where you point your ambition.

Where do most leaders you know plateau?

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Nobody told them to work harder.

That's the problem.

UC Berkeley spent eight months studying what happens when a team fully embraces AI.

By month six, they were burning out.

Because nobody set a limit.

To-do lists expanded to fill every hour AI freed up. And then kept going.

People expanded their scope. Covered more ground. Put in more hours.

Without anyone asking them to.

My neighbour is a software engineer. He hasn't written a line of code since December. Never been more productive.

Also never been more exhausted.

He has so many open loops running at once that by the end of every day, he's spent. Not from the work. From the decisions.

A friend building his own AI project described it as an addiction. Constant dopamine hits. He can't stop.

The pattern is always the same.

The tool removes a constraint. Output goes up.

And the absence of someone saying "that's enough" turns a gain into an endurance test.

Speed limits exist for a reason.

Not to slow people down. To protect them.

When AI removed the speed limit on knowledge work, most leaders treated it like an opportunity.

Few treated it as a decision.

The decision being: what pace is sustainable for this team?

That's not a technology question.

That's a leadership question.

And the leader who never asked it didn't fail at AI adoption.

They failed at the oldest job in leadership.

Setting the pace.

What's the unspoken speed limit on your team right now?

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A simple editorial image with the following quote: Your team adopted AI and output tripled. So did the burnout.

"Let’s test this."

Three words. No assumption behind them.

I have coached product teams on experimentation for 10+ years.

Almost every team started with the same pattern.

Someone proposes a feature. Then they propose a test. The team agrees. They build it and add analytics for everything.

It looks like experimentation. It feels productive. But nothing changes.

The teams that succeed do something different. They start every experiment with an assumption they can name. That assumption becomes a hypothesis. The hypothesis becomes a test.

Not "let’s test a new onboarding flow."

Instead: "We believe asking fewer questions in the first session will reduce new user drop-off."

That changes what you measure, what counts as success, and what you do next.

Here’s what I’ve seen separate the best teams from the rest:

1. They write down the assumption before building anything.
2. They connect every test to a metric leadership already tracks.
3. They kill features when the evidence says to.

That last one is rare. Most teams only ship. The best teams also kill.

The difference between experimentation that compounds and experimentation that’s theatre comes down to one thing.

Are you testing features, or testing what you believe?

AI removed the building bottleneck. Now the bottleneck is deciding what to build. That's a judgment call. And it requires experimentation.

I’ve used Mixpanel as both a founder, and as a consultant with clients. The temptation is always the same: track everything.

Their experiments feature forces the thinking. You define the hypothesis. You set the success metric. You run the test against something the business already tracks.

Their metric trees do the same thing from the other direction. Start from the number that matters, work down to what you can test.

That connection is what most experimentation setups are missing.

When experiments connect to the metrics your business already tracks, decisions get faster. You stop debating opinions and start acting on evidence.

If your experiments can’t trace back to a metric your business tracks, they won’t change decisions. And experiments that don’t change decisions turn into feature bloat.

Have you ever killed a feature based on experiment results?

This post is in paid partnership with Mixpanel.

Try Mixpanel Experimentation: https://lnkd.in/ep-a-HUq

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Bezos says you need 70% of the information.

I've seen quarters vanish chasing the other 30%.

It happens the same way every time.

A team spots a problem.
Everyone agrees it's real.
Then the planning starts.

More data.
More stakeholders.
More alignment meetings.
Another deck.
Another review cycle.

Three months later, the problem is still there.
It's been discussed more thoroughly.

Amazon built a leadership principle around this.
They call it "bias for action."

It might sound reckless.
But it's the opposite.

Bezos's logic: most decisions are reversible.
You walk through the door, see what happens, and walk back if it's wrong.

But most organisations treat every decision like it's permanent.

They slow down on reversible choices because being wrong feels expensive.

The real cost is the time spent not learning.
I've seen this play out in every organisation I've worked with.

A hundred people can name what's broken.
Maybe ten will propose a fix.
Almost nobody ships the first version.

The gap between "we all agree this is broken" and "someone actually built something" is where most change dies.

The ideas exist.
The strategy is usually sound.

The default in most organisations is analysis over action.
Consensus over experiment.

The teams that actually move tend to share one trait:
they'd rather be wrong and learn than be right and late.

They ship small. They learn fast.
They treat decisions as experiments, not commitments.

Speed isn't the point.
Starting before you're sure is.

What's the last decision your team made in a day that would normally take a month?

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Nobody disagrees in the meeting.

Everyone disagrees after it.

Every leadership team I've coached has a version of this.

They know what should come off the list.
They know which initiative is a distraction.

They sit in silence because saying it means disappointing someone important.

You don't have a prioritisation problem.
You have a courage problem.

This is how roadmaps end up with 47 items marked as critical.

The items stay because the conversation to cut them feels too risky.

Courage is telling a senior stakeholder their project moves to Q3.

Courage is keeping a good idea on hold because the timing is wrong.

Courage is saying "not yet" to someone you respect.

The frameworks exist. The will to use them is the gap.

The offsite ends with a clear list.
Within three weeks, the list doubles.

The first stakeholder who pushes back gets what they want.
That is the whole story.

The discipline lives in the conversation after the ranking.

When did you last take something off the list and actually keep it off?

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Anthropic just dropped new research.

This chart stopped me.

They analysed real Claude usage data across thousands of occupational tasks.

Computer and mathematical roles: 94% theoretical capability. 33% actual usage.

The pattern repeats across nearly every white-collar category.

If AI could handle most of your team's work and they're using it for a fraction of that, the bottleneck is not the tool.

It's one of three things:

1. Your people don't know what's possible.
2. They know, but workflows haven't changed.
3. They know, but they don't trust it enough to change how they work.

Training solves the first. Process redesign solves the second. Only sustained leadership attention solves the third.

Most organisations are stuck on number one. Running lunch-and-learns about prompt engineering while the real barriers are structural.

No unemployment surge for highly exposed workers. Not yet.

But hiring of 22-25 year-olds into exposed roles has already dropped 14%.

And the data is moving faster than most leadership teams are.

That reshaping won't happen by itself. Someone has to lead it.

Where is your team on this gap?

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Ask someone about their worst manager.

They won't mention strategy.

Nobody starts with the roadmap. Nobody talks about output targets or quarterly planning.

They talk about how the person made them feel.

Being dismissed in a meeting. Having an idea ignored and then hearing it repeated by someone else. The tone in a 1-on-1 that made them feel small.

Now flip it.

Ask about the best leader they've worked for. Same thing happens in reverse.

Nobody leads with "great strategy." They say things like "she actually listened" or "he made me feel like my opinion counted."

I ask my coaching clients this question. Not once has anyone started with strategy.

That's what I find interesting about emotional impact. It doesn't show up on a scorecard. There's no KPI for "how people feel after talking to you."

But it's the thing people carry home. It's the thing they tell their partner about over dinner. And it's the most durable form of influence a leader has.

Maya Angelou said it decades ago.

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

So what does "how you make people feel" actually look like on a Monday afternoon?

I reckon it's smaller than most people think.

It's whether you look up from your laptop when someone walks in. It's whether people leave your meetings feeling heard or feeling like they wasted their time.

It's whether you ask questions before giving answers. Whether you remember what someone said last week and follow up on it.

None of this is complicated. All of it is felt.

What's the smallest thing a leader did that stuck with you?

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19% slower.
They thought they were 20% faster.
246 tasks. 16 developers.

METR ran a randomised controlled trial.

Experienced developers on real codebases.
Bug fixes, features, refactors.

AI tools made them slower.

But when asked, they believed AI had sped them up by 20%.

69% kept using AI after the study ended.
Even knowing the results.

When the tool feels good, you stop questioning whether it works.

This isn't just an AI story.

It's a dopamine story.

Cheap dopamine is everywhere now.
Social media. AI tools. Every new shortcut.

They feel productive.
They feel like progress.
They feel like learning.

When we feel we are learning, we may in fact be procrastinating.

Consuming feels like work.
But creating is where the value lives.

Time disappears in the gap between the two.

This is where it becomes a leadership question.

The gap between feeling productive and being productive is invisible from the inside.

It applies at every level.

A person scrolling instead of shipping.
A team adopting tools without measuring outcomes.
An organisation chasing trends instead of advancing goals.

The leader's job is to notice when things are busy but not moving.

That's intentionality.

Choosing creating over consuming.
Choosing meaningful over busy.

Making it a daily practice.

What's your version of this trap?

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A comparative illustration of feeling productive vs being being productive

23,000 engineers just agreed on one thing.

An AI CEO admitted the truth:
It's making your best people quit.

Dax Raad is the CEO of anoma.ly.
He posted 6 lines on X last weekend.

925,000 views.
23,000 upvotes on Reddit.
Business Insider covered it.

The line that hit hardest:

"The 2 people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing. They will quit soon."

It hit because it's not about AI.
It's about what leaders are choosing not to see.

Most leaders I coach buy the productivity story.
Faster. Cheaper. Fewer people.

The people doing the work see something else.
And 23,000 of them confirmed it.

Last week, an engineer told me:
They're more productive than ever.
Yet more exhausted than ever.

This is adoption without intention:

Volume without quality.
Speed without comprehension.
Acceleration without direction.

This is how teams fall apart in silence.

AI doesn't fix what was already broken.
It accelerates it.

The question isn't whether your team uses AI.
It's whether anyone's asked what it's costing.

Ask your best engineer one question this week:
"What's gotten harder since we adopted AI?"

Here are the links:
→ Dax's post: https://lnkd.in/ebW7yCjw
→ Reddit thread: https://lnkd.in/ekxhvHSg

What are you seeing on your team?

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