Francisco Trindade

Technical design documents were far from perfect as an alignment tool, but they were good enough. Now, we have endless documents generated by LLMs that not many people can read (and even fewer understand). Instead of aligning engineers, they make people disengaged. We are building a lot of great tools to align agents, there are new harnesses coming out every week. But we don’t seem to be spending much time discussing how to better align people in the new context? And the people are the ones driving the agents… When each of them can produce ten times more, any misalignment between them gets amplified too. Francisco Trindade (@frankmt, VP of Engineering at Braze) shared how he used visualizations to solve this problem: newsletter.manager.dev/p/mor…

A couple of months ago, a Staff engineer in my team told me: “We seem to be going backwards in how we manage projects”. He was working on a project that was just stuck. • The engineers felt blocked because design wouldn’t provide enough direction. • The designers felt they were being rushed to deliver suboptimal work. • The product manager was in the middle trying to coordinate a path but also struggling to keep up with all the possibilities. ------ This is a quote from the guest article @frankmt shared in manager.dev last week: newsletter.manager.dev/p/mor… The rest of the post is also in his voice! ------ The situation escalated to me and my peers in design and product management. We couldn’t agree either: there were lots of opinions and not many facts. We were now in a six-person asynchronous discussion, going in circles. This problem wasn’t unique to this project. We can now deliver output in many areas much faster than before. Prototypes are easy to build, code is easier to write, testing is easy to execute. But all that extra output comes with extra noise. AI speeds up some parts of the process much more than others, and we rarely look at what that does to the whole. We speed up code delivery but don’t think about how that affects reviews. We speed up prototyping but don’t think about how we are going to decide amongst all of the options. That’s exactly what was happening in our project: there was a lot of output from everyone, but no agreement. Read Francisco’s post on the best way to get unstuck: newsletter.manager.dev/p/mor…