Companies Should Stop Obsessing Over AI Tools And Do This Instead

It's becoming quite common these days that companies are putting so much effort on using shiny new AI tools, but they forget what's really, really important. If you don't know me yet, my name is Gregor Ojstersek. I'm the founder of Engineering Leadership Newsletter, and in this video I'll be sharing why companies should not focus so much on just AI tools, but there are a lot more important things to take care of. All right, so let's first discuss a little bit about what's happening in our industry. Especially in the overall engineering organizations. There are so many unrealistic expectations coming from different company leaders. I'm seeing and I'm hearing that a lot from different engineers and also engineering leaders across the industry. And personally, I've also seen a lot of these cases when I'm doing consulting and also coaching. As well. And for example, well, one of the, one of the reasons, I mean, I'm hearing this quite regularly, quite regularly, is that CEOs or other leaders in the company are trying to do vibe coding of their, their homepage of, of their website and telling engineers how easy it is to actually build with that AI tool, right? But I've seen many, many unrealistic expectations coming from company leaders, like believing AI is a plug-and-play solution, expecting AI eliminate all manual work, underestimating the cost and complexity of building in internal LLMs, assuming AI will just magically understand everything, and so on, replacing the whole teams. You know, the expectation from a lot of people, especially non-technical people, are that AI is something that they need to desperately focus on and, you know, try to get the most out of it as possible. But the real reality is something different. There is no better productivity hack than a great culture. That is, that is really, really important to keep in mind. And I think a lot of companies these days are forgetting about that. And that is very That is very unfortunate because this is where the real productivity becomes. Acquiring a new shiny AI tool without focusing on a great culture is not going to do anything. If you have a bad culture, people will not be motivated, people will not be driven, people will be looking to go elsewhere. When people feel that they are valued, they can grow inside a company, they feel excited to come to work, they are going to be doing, you know, their best work possible. So always, always keep this in mind. And unfortunately, a lot of leaders these days, a lot of companies are putting a lot of their efforts in on wrong things. And let me tell you why exactly is this the case, especially, you know, AI tools are giving you a way to, for example, if you're using an AI tool like Cursor or Cloud Code or even Lovable or Replit or something, something like that, they're going to be able to, to write code for you. But the thing is that the speed of writing code has never been an issue. The overall bottleneck has always been the mindset and overall, you know, a lot of other, other stuff, a lot of other stuff like building the right things, processes and stuff like— we will go into that pretty soon. But writing code has never been a bottleneck for creating, for creating software. It's always been decisions, miscommunications, issues inside a company and so on. And if you believe that just, you know, a new AI tool is going to make you so much more productive because now you can write code faster, at the end of the day, outcomes are not going to be better because, because you're writing code faster. You're still not, you know, building the right things. You're still not providing value to the customers. You just don't need to type out as much code as you did before. So yeah, instead of trying to focus fully on writing code faster, instead, this is what you should actually focus on. I've seen too many bad processes inside different companies. And the problem with this is when there are too many meetings that are not needed, that are, you know, are just, are just stealing your focus time. When you feel that, when you feel that you, you, it's not really necessary for you to be there, your energy is getting drained and you don't have any energy left to do, to do great work in general. So instead of trying to write code faster, try to focus on making your overall process better. And that is going to be a really big improvement for everyone. If the process is going to be better, if people have more time for focus, if meetings are going to be more productive, if there's not going to be any, you know, unnecessary discussions that are not needed, clear action items, ownership, empowering people inside your teams. That is where the real work is going to get done. Let's go to the next one, is, you know, focusing on building the right things. As I mentioned before, this is much more important than pure, pure speed of, of typing and pure speed of outputting code. You can, you can create 10,000 or 20,000 lines of code. But if you're building a wrong thing for, for the users, it won't really mean much. It won't mean anything. You're just wasting your time, you're wasting company's time, you're wasting also, you know, people need to maintain this code as well. So if you don't build the right things, everything else is going to be a waste of time. So a lot more focusing on building the right things is the way to go. And after that, after that, you can use, you know, different AI tools, you can use different whatever you wish in order to, to output the functionalities that you need. But, you know, focusing on building the right things first is, is very, very crucial. And that is a big bottleneck for a lot of teams. Because if you build a new feature really, really fast, but that feature is not going to be, you know, used by the customers because customers don't really need it, then you're wasting a lot of the time. Also, the next one: too many people leave the company because of bad management. This is, this is very true. And the reason, the reason is that good managers make others around, around them better, but bad managers make others, you know, around them worse. And it's really hard. I worked with, with both good managers and also bad managers. And I know how it is when you don't get along with your manager and, you know, they don't understand you and you don't understand what they would want. And it's becoming— it's really problematic. It's really problematic. It's hard to do good work because your work is not being appreciated. And it's hard to actually put your best foot forward to provide suggestions, to provide improvements, because overall they wouldn't get accepted. So creating a great— finding great managers is going to be a really, really huge productivity boost for the whole company. And once you have them, they should be appreciated because, you know, good managers are hard to find. And yeah, if you have them, make sure to appreciate them. Let's go to the next one. A lot of the problems and overall productivity loss comes from poor decision-making across the company. And there's so many stagnation in terms of Should we make— should we go this route or should we go the next road? But then people are procrastinating with actually making a decision. I like to say that if, if you don't make a decision and you wait, wait, and wait, it's a lot worse than if you would just make a wrong decision and then you would see that you made a wrong decision. Then you would be adjusting it to the one that you know that would be working. But if you're waiting for a long time to trying to really find and try to find a perfect, perfect solution, then you're just wasting a lot of time. I like to say that no decision is actually a decision. So yeah, procrastination is a big thing, a big problem across different companies. Another problem is especially leadership team or people who are, who are not in touch with, you know, with, with hands-on work. They make certain decisions and they just let know people who are working on a daily basis on specific things. Like, for example, we need to adopt this AI tool. We need to, we need to use this. This is the approach that we're going to take. This is the process. But they don't even ask others if this is the best way to go forward. The problem is that this is very, this is very problematic. And for everyone who is then doing hands-on work, they need to, they need to use that on a daily basis, but they actually don't want to use that. And it's making their, their, their work harder as well. So poor decision-making across the company is very problematic. You know, just making, making better decisions, that's where you are, you are, your productivity is going to be a lot, a lot better for everyone. Let's go to the next one, which is a lot of politics, politics games, and not enough of getting things done. I've seen this across many companies and obviously to a certain extent there are always going to be some politics involved in every company. But instead of trying to, you know, always play the politics game and focus on, on that? Why should not we rather focus on getting things done and focus on what's really important? That is to delight our customers and build features and build functionalities and to solve problems for them. But instead, there are too many egos, there are too many conflicts inside, inside a company. Between decision makers, stakeholders, and also investors and so on. And there's so many time wasted here just because, you know, people don't want to focus on what's really important, but instead too much politics is being played and, you know, too much of the games of who versus who. Instead of let's, let's all work together to find the best solutions for the company. All right. And let's go to the last one, but not least one. I've seen this in a lot of different companies where, you know, the problem with having low performers on the team is that if you tolerate low performance, that becomes a new standard. And when you have high performers on the team, they're going to see that and they will become a lot less motivated because of it. If you tolerate, if you tolerate, like for example, you know, someone not doing any work at all, they are not honoring any deadlines, they are not providing value, they are not helping anyone, they are just focusing on really the minimum they need to do. Other people who are really actively focusing on making things better and trying to get better themselves every day, helping others, making sure that the projects are successful. Those people are going to be demotivated heavily, and they will either look for the new company, for a new role in a different company, or they will just start also be doing minimum as well. So I've seen too many times where you know, leadership failed to address, to address that. And that has gone into the company culture and has shown to be a big, big problem for people who really cared about a product, who really cared about the organization and the overall team, overall team and organization and so on. So yeah, those are the, those are the 6 must-specific things that are a lot more important and give you a lot more productivity improvements than just pure, than just pure AI tools. If you focus on that, those, those things, those are going to be a lot more impactful for your company, for the business, and also for the success that you're doing. Always keep in mind that the best productivity hack is a great culture. Nothing else can, can, can be better for the overall productivity. To learn more, you can subscribe to my newsletter. It's called Engineering Leadership. I have— there are more than 160,000 readers already reading, reading it. I publish 2 new articles every week. And yeah, I hope this was, this was helpful to you, and I'll see you on the next one.