No Water Breaks

VP of Design tenure now averages about 2.1 years. VP of Product, 2.3. CRO, 1.8. CMO, 1.8. Across the cycled-out, the scripts rhyme. Script on the way in: we need leadership, we're building out the function, we want you to elevate the practice, the craft, the workflow. Script on the way out: your department was friction. The function isn't necessary. AI does it better. We're going in a different direction.

The direction was always the same. Run faster. No clapping. No water breaks. All the trophies are ours. All the missteps are yours. Just run faster.

This isn't one company's problem - and AI didn't start it. The play has run for five-plus years, sharpened in the last two. Hire a leader to elevate the function. Blame them for what's outside their authority. Cycle them out. Hire the next.

To be fair: I believe you're 50% of every problem if you care. Own your 50%.

The executives running this play aren't villains. Most of them are exhausted too. The "design doesn't get it" script doesn't get pulled off a shelf by someone who hates designers. It gets pulled off a shelf by someone who needs an answer to "why aren't we shipping faster" and "why we aren't selling more" and doesn't have anywhere else to put it. It gets pulled off the shelf by the pressure to continually grow by 30% yoy, providing value to shareholders or VCs. All real pressures. Choices, but real pressures. Listen, executives have the right to shape organizations however they want. 20:1 eng-to-design ratio - doable. No HR department - go for it. CEO as micromanaging CPO - sometimes a great idea.

The velocity-only org runs on the same engine no matter what discipline ends up under the wheel. It's not malice. It's the absence of slack in the system. An org built around "run faster" has no room for the work that doesn't immediately show up on the dashboard. Trust. Culture. Change management. The team cohesion and repair work between sprints. When that work is treated as overhead instead of infrastructure, the people responsible for it get cycled out faster than the work itself gets deprioritized. This year, it's design leaders. Next year it'll be someone else. (More on this in Why Are We Asking Humans to Be More Loyal Than the Systems They Serve.)

Here's the flip.

Velocity has been a differentiator for about twenty-four months. It isn't anymore. When every PM has Claude open in another tab, every engineer is shipping with Cursor, and every designer is prompting their way to a third iteration, speed flattens into table stakes. The race ends not because anyone wins it. The gap just closes.

The 2024 productivity bump from AI being new was a one-time thing. The 2025 advantage went to the orgs that restructured fastest - did the hard foundational work that allowed AI and orgs to move quickly. The 2026/2027 special sauce, the one I think is coming, doesn't go to whoever adopts the next model the day it ships. It goes to whoever can hold their people steady while the rest of the industry hyperventilates.

Companies like Linear and 37signals stand out. My money is on the way they operate. The ones making more rational bets and more deliberate people investments. The companies that didn't cycle through three design leaders, didn't kill the watering holes, didn't burn the cultural capital they had. They're going to look very different in eighteen months. Stronger brands because they didn't lay anyone off. The best people. Better products. More durable orgs. Steady people compound.

Steady people compound.

Everyone has the same tools. Everyone has roughly the same model access. Everyone is generating similar outputs from similar prompts. What separates a team that compounds from a team that breaks isn't tooling. It's whether the people inside it have the trust, the rest, the context, and the clarity to actually use and innovate with the tools they have.

I'm hearing this in client work right now. Two asks come up directly: help us fix these AI-created journeys, and help our team work more fluidly. A third pattern shows up once I'm in there, but no one is calling about it yet.

1. Shipping faster, but the experiences lack unification. The workflows don't flow. The journeys aren't enjoyable. The experiences don't address human anxieties and tendencies. Everything is flat, cold, digital. The fix isn't more AI output. It's investment in the people who hold the cross-feature view and the time they need to make the seams disappear.

2. Teams (especially design + product + engineering) lack a coherent workflow. Everyone is shipping. The old SDLC and checks and balances aren't holding. PM, design, and engineering aren't aligned. Design systems aren't optimized for AI. Content strategy is a mess. AI is QAing itself. We're measuring the wrong things, maybe. AI can prototype anything. It can't hold the seams. That takes investment in the people whose job is the middle, and the rituals they run to keep the team aligned.

3. People are burnt out and operating from a place of fear vs. opportunity. No one calls me about this one - it's sitting underneath the other two. You can't get the upside of speed when the people running at it are running scared. Psychological safety, real rest, honest career conversations - that investment is what flips the operating mode from fear to opportunity.

The velocity-only org optimized for the artifact and forgot the seams between the people producing it. Fix the seams and all three start to resolve.

For the past two years, the story of work has been: tools got faster, jobs got harder, people got squeezed. That's a story with a clear loser. Everyone. Sustainable advantage doesn't come from being the loudest in a race that's already plateauing. It comes from doing the work everyone else deprioritized.

The leaders holding their teams together while everyone around them chased velocity look quiet right now. They're going to look like geniuses in eighteen months. Not because they predicted the next model release schedule. Because they remembered that organizations are made of people, and that people compound when you invest in them.

To every leader trying to hold their team steady right now - and the ones who got pushed out trying - this isn't on you. The script that got run on you is about to expire. The companies that figured this out are going to need you.

Adopt AI & Invest in the people.