FFC NL 2025 TALKS

We had a product leader writing detailed specs in one timezone and five engineers building them in another. That worked fine until AI agents could take a spec and produce reliable code. Suddenly our engineers were doing the same job as a machine, only slower, and the real bottleneck was product decisions sitting in someone else's inbox eight hours away.

So we stopped writing detailed specs. We gave engineers high-level product requirements and told them to make the calls themselves. They went from implementers to decision-makers. In five weeks, issues completed per sprint doubled and median time-to-merge halved from 4.6 to 2.3 hours with the same team & same tools.

This talk's about recognising when AI makes a Conway's Law problem visible that was always there, how we restructured ownership across a remote team, what went well, and what we got wrong.