"Every new idea depended on our engineers, and our internal requests were piling up faster than we could clear them. We were adding new people to our company every week, but our engineering team was underwater. Every new feature, every minor internal tool, every process tweak depended on our developers. We were hiring as fast as we could, but it felt like shoveling sand against the tide."
"We started teaching non‑technical employees (designers, product managers, operations leads, corporate support teams) how to build their own tools and automations. At first it felt radical. Then it felt obvious. Fast forward: we grew to over $200M in annual revenue with only about 200 people. We stopped the hiring frenzy, but the business was growing faster than ever. Along the way, we documented everything in an internal playbook for our team."
"Inside our company we set up two " AI guilds": one for technical implementation (e.g., building tools) and one focused on adoption and use cases (e.g., using tools). They met monthly, included people from every department, and shared concrete experiments. A product manager might present how she used an AI tool to understand the codebase without tapping on the shoulder of an engineer. An operations lead might show how he used a simple script to automate dispute management."
Super.com experienced an engineering bottleneck where every new idea and internal request relied on developers, causing backlog despite rapid hiring. The company trained non‑technical employees—designers, product managers, operations leads, and support teams—to build their own tools and automations, enabling faster internal solutions. That approach supported growth to over $200M in annual revenue with roughly 200 people while reducing hiring pressure. An internal playbook captured practices and drew interest from other leaders. Cross-functional AI guilds were created for technical implementation and adoption, meeting monthly to share experiments and practical use cases across departments.
#engineering-bottleneck #non-technical-empowerment #ai-and-automation-adoption #cross-functional-collaboration
Read at Fast Company
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]