Christina Noren

founding VP PM to IPO @Splunk, late 90s @MSN, 4 IPOs, art tech martyr, anti-statist, artist, patron, INTP 8w7, US ‘citizen’ born NL, recent widow of Paul Boutin

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

https://t.co/t7QPSl9AuP

Definition #3

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

@jbekes

[Michael Nygard @mtnygard]

Every internal “replace Splunk” project I’ve seen woefully underinvested in the front end experience. The back end scaling challenge appeals to the engineers more.

Between AI to create a better experience and AI _being_ the experience I bet those projects will be a lot more successful now.

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

@kajvandeloo

[Gene Kim @RealGeneKim]

What if organizations defined the developer role so narrowly that they actually make developers feel less capable, less confident they can solve problems, and more vulnerable from being automated by AI?

I was talking with Annie Vella, Distinguished Engineer at Westpac NZ, who has researched hundreds of developers across many different organizations. Her masters thesis might hint that the above might actually be happening. In the old days, developers did everything — they talked to customers, wrote code, deployed it, watched customers to make it better.

But for decades, many large enterprises have continued to shrink developer role down to just writing code. Architects make Visio diagrams, testers test, BA talk to customers and write requirements documents, PMs manage the project.

And the developer's job scope has been whittled to the single most automatable task.

Dr. Andrej Karpathy says AI is good at replacing tasks, not roles. But what happens when organizations have reduced a role to essentially one task (typing out code)?

Annie’s longitudinal research found that self-efficacy (not gender, not seniority, not experience) was the single strongest predictor of perceived productivity and positive developer experiences with AI tools. Self-efficacy is fancy talk for the feeling you have that you can successfully accomplish something: "I've done hard things before, and I can do hard things again."

Annie and I kept coming back to a troubling question: if a developer has spent a decade only being allowed to type code — never designing, never talking to customers, never deploying — where would they get the confidence to suddenly do more? Self-efficacy comes from mastery experiences.

What if the system they're working within that has narrowed their role also destroyed their ability to outgrow it? And the leaders who grew up in these hyper-specialized systems may themselves lack the breadth of experience to even envision what a broader developer role looks like. Or imagine what AI can do for their organization besides "automate coding."

The pinnacle of this madness: make the job codes in your organization hyper-rigid so that you can outsource the whole function, and switch between outsourcers every couple of years. The specialization is literally codified in contracts, making it even harder to undo.

In contrast, when developers know their job is to solve problems, they see AI as a superpower, not an existential threat. These are the developers who already know how to talk to customers, design systems, test their own work, and deploy to production. They don't need permission to do more — they've been doing more their whole career.

Learn how leaders are reshaping their organizations with AI at the upcoming Enterprise AI Summit, from OpenAI, Amazon, Disney, Block, Netflix, John Deere, Vanguard, and more. Full program below — see you there!

[Michael Nygard @mtnygard]

Behind every increment of enshittification you’ll find a product manager hitting their OKR.

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

@QuinnyPig @kylegalbraith true but in part because those new yorkers rolling in with a hangover at 9 expect us on the west coast to be sharp on conference calls with them at 6 our time. (typing this at 4:53 am about to go work on a pricing model for an east coast company after having gone to sleep at 9)

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

I do not disagree, sorry to those who do not like it. Most people that have drawn six figure salaries as PMs in our industry in my extensive experience are not what I consider to have PM dna. That is just the truth. I am a little more removed but same is clearly true for engineers. The push for 'everyone to STEM' as a verb has been harmful to the people it has pushed and to the public at large in terms of enshittified products from enshittified companies.

[Zeb Evans @DJ_CURFEW]

Today we reduced headcount by 22%. The business is the strongest it's ever been. So I think it's important to be direct about what I'm seeing and why.

First, I made this decision and I own it. I did it because the way to operate at the highest level of productivity is changing, and to win the future, ClickUp needs to change with it.

Second, this wasn't about cutting costs. Most savings from this change will flow directly back into the people who stay. We'll be introducing million-dollar salary bands. If you create outsized impact using AI, you'll be paid outside of traditional bands.

Most importantly, I have the deepest gratitude for those affected. We're doing this from a position of strength specifically so we can take care of people properly. Everyone affected receives a package aimed at honoring their contributions and easing the transition.

I only see two options: wait for this to play out gradually in the market or be honest about what I'm seeing and act proactively.

THE 100X ORGANIZATION
The primary change is that we're restructuring around what I call 100x org. The goal is 100x output. The roles required to build at the highest level are fundamentally different than they were a year ago.

Incremental improvements to existing systems won't get us there. We need new ones. That means creating enough disruption to rebuild rather than iterate on what's already broken.

The common narrative is that AI makes everyone more productive. It doesn't. Many of the workflows of today, if left unchanged, create bottlenecks in AI systems.

These roles will evolve. But waiting for that to happen naturally means falling behind now.

The 100x org is actually heavily dependent on people - infinitely more than today. This is only possible with 10x people that have embraced and adopted new ways of working.

THE BUILDERS, AGENT MANAGERS, AND FRONT-LINERS

— THE BUILDERS: 10X ENGINEERS
I don't think most companies have internalized what's actually happening with AI in engineering. The common narrative is that AI makes all engineers more productive. That may be true in isolation, but at an organization level - that is the farthest thing from reality.

Here's what we've validated recently at ClickUp: the great engineers, the ones who can orchestrate, architect, and review, are becoming 100x engineers. They're not writing code. They're directing agents that write code. The skill is judgment.

AI makes the best engineers wildly more productive, and everyone else using AI slows these engineers down.
Think about it - the bottlenecks are (1) orchestration - telling AI what to do, and (2) reviewing - what AI did. Everything is leapfrogged and no longer needed.
So who do you want orchestrating and reviewing code?

And how do you want your best engineers to spend their time?

If your best engineers are spending time reviewing other people's code, then this is inherently an inefficient bottleneck. These engineers can review their agent's code much faster than reviewing human code.

The new world is about enabling your 10x engineers to become 100x.

The wrong strategy is to push every engineer to use infinite tokens. Companies doing this are celebrating 500% more pull requests. But customer outcomes don't match the volume of code being generated.

I call this the great reckoning of AI coding, and every company will face this soon if not already.

More code is just another bottleneck to the best engineers, and ultimately to your company's impact as well.

— THE BUILDERS: 10X PRODUCT MANAGERS
Product management and design roles are merging.

Designers that have customer focus, become more like product managers.

And product managers that have intuition for UX become more like designers.

The bottleneck of user research is gone. It takes us just one mention of an agent to kickoff research and analyze results.

The bottleneck of product <> design iteration is also gone. The product builder iterates on their own, along with agents and skills that ensure alignment with quality and strategy.

Also controversial today - I believe that the wrong strategy is to have your PMs shipping code - that just introduces another bottleneck that the best engineers will waste their time on.

To be clear, PMs should be coding but they should do this in a playground to iterate, validate, and scope. That code should not go to production.

Everything outside of managing systems, orchestrating AI, and reviewing output becomes a bottleneck.
That's why the other roles that are critical along with these are the systems managers (to reduce bottlenecks) along with a bottleneck you can't replace - customer meeting time.

— THE SYSTEM MANAGERS
Ironically, the people that automate their jobs with AI will always have a job. They become owners of the AI systems - agent managers. We have many examples of these people at ClickUp.

The underlying systems in which we operate are absolutely critical to get right. I think most companies are delusional to think they can iterate on existing systems and compete in this new world.

You must create enough disruption so that old systems are deprecated entirely. If there's any definition for 'AI native' that's what it is.

— THE FRONT-LINERS
In a world that will become saturated with AI communication, the human touch will matter more than anything to customers.

This is a bottleneck that you shouldn't replace - even when agents are high enough quality to do video meetings.

One-on-one meeting time with customers is something that shouldn't be automated. The systems around the meetings should be - so that front-liners spend nearly 100% of their time with customers.

REWARDING 100X IMPACT
In a world where companies are able to do so much more with less, where does that excess money go?
In our case, much of the savings in this new operating model will flow directly back to those that enabled it.

We must reward people that create productivity accordingly. This aligns incentives on both sides. Plus, in a world where your best people create 100x impact, you can't afford to lose them.

You should aim to retain these employees for decades. The context they have and their ability to efficiently orchestrate and review will be nearly impossible to replace.

Compensation bands of today should be thrown out the door. We're introducing $1 million cash/year salary bands with a path available to nearly everyone in the company if they produce 100x impact by creating or managing AI systems.

THE FUTURE
Nearly every company will make changes like these. The ones that do it proactively will define what comes next.

The future is not fewer people. It's different work, new roles, and better rewards for those who embrace it. We're already seeing entirely new roles emerge, like Agent Managers, that didn't exist a year ago.

ClickUp is positioning to lead this shift, not just internally, but for our customers too. I've never been more certain about where we're headed.

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

Microsoft Plots New Copilot Features Inspired by OpenClaw

" Those tasks include serving as a product manager’s assistant that oversees the status of projects, the person said."

tell me you don't know PM without telling me you don't understand know PM https://t.co/kXc2H8RabI

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

And thank you, Wispr, from the bottom of my heart for not abbreviating my articulated going to's as gonna &amp; want to's as wanna. Also for not capitalizing random nouns like the US president. However, as seen in this comment, you still need to cease use of apostrophes for plurals.

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

After increasing frustration with the idiocy of Siri voice to text, making stupid mistakes with common English words and sentence structures, and defaulting to hearing the most unusual, but infrequently used, names in my address book --even when don't intend to name a person at all I am just thrilled with @WisprFlow. My only ask is better ability to train it on or spell pit unusual given names when I *am* intentionally addressing or referring to a person with one!

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

I agree with this thesis but am coming to terms with how I feel about it. I'm in AI tools daily but not at the level I know that I could be. Always mixed feelings about Kurzweil references bc the one time I was at a small conference w him in person in 2003 he was so cringeworthy.

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

https://t.co/Ve3Vn9F0Z3

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

@RonConway So sorry to hear that, you are a legend. My husband passed very suddenly from a second cancer in October a year after being cleared of the first. I know many survivors of many years and hope you get to be one of them.

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

@martin_plural @firstround Of course. In my house I have to convince people NOT to take off their shoes and to walk on my very nice rugs arranged in a path and NOT step around them awkwardly onto hardwood floors where they make more immediately obvious dirt. This explains my general divergence from Lenny;)

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

@pastarchive @abrams would that today it would take more effort to reach for the uppercase.

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

when I arrived at Microsoft in 1997 as part of the first wave of people in MSN ops the norm was that engineers booked their vacations right after the gold master shipped. I was asked to take on MSN release processes for a time and they had me meet with the person in Bothell with a massive binder of CD release processes. Things did not go well.

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

@aunder I am literally ROTFL now. Thanks for making my day.

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

@lennysan we may need PMs to be PMs again too.

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

@stevesi biketivists are ableists

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

@auren The user experience is not disposable unless we've decided we don't care about the user experience.

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

I don't buy the FDE theory of no product. A product engineered to be modified but still upgradable and maintainable is a different matter. FDEs have been leaving shit behind since the term was coined by early Palantir covering for no product. I do not believe AI changes any of that.

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

@bhalligan @sequoia Continuous, Circular and Taste I can get behind. I was writing about Continuous Everything 8 years ago. Some of the others need a bit more explanation to me. https://t.co/lS5O4GZfLp

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

I am not a man but spend plenty of time thinking about the Roman Empire and McLuhan. I also did a major artwork in my teens on the subject of Narcissus and Goldmund. This is lazy writing and perhaps a symptom of too
much AI use by the writer @ezraklein - please explain yourself.

[Christina Noren @cfrln]

Opinion | I Saw Something New in San Francisco - The New York Times

You lost me at fellow 'men' in your opening to this. Why did you make this word choice? Why did the NYT allow it? https://t.co/GwgYbpFcdA