Survival of the focused

Adapting to the constraints of AI

A product organisation that once knew exactly what it was doing is now spread across nine things. It had a WIP limit of four, but nobody talks about that now. Growth is king, all of the demands are urgent, and each is sponsored by someone who matters.

So the teams try to do all nine and struggle to finish any of them. From above, where the stakeholders are waiting for their specific thing, it looks like sluggishness. Leadership starts to worry that the product development organisation has become slow.

It hasn’t. It has lost focus, and there’s no recognition that this lack of focus is what causes drag.

Starting out

A startup that survives does so by adapting to one environment. Focus is not a virtue it chooses; it is the condition of survival. Do one thing, for one kind of customer, better than the alternatives, or die. Then the thing works, the company grows, and it looks to reach beyond its niche. Growth demands that it develops new products, new customers, new markets.

But reaching out takes attention off the core, and every new bet is uncertain. The organisation wants both to keep owning its niche completely, and to grow past it. It refuses to give up either, so it never chooses. It commits to everything at once and calls it ambition. The teams get overloaded, and focus suffers. From the outside, this doesn’t look like the result of a choice. It looks like slowness, and the obvious answer to a team slowing down is that they should go faster.

Accelerants

Then AI comes along, promising easy acceleration. Investment in AI goes up, and the organisation expects order of magnitude improvements.

Unfortunately, AI adoption also involves some speed bumps. A study of 22,000 developers across two years has found that output may be rising, but bugs and rework are rising with it, suggesting that total cost of ownership isn’t improving.

That’s before we get to the speeding tickets. Costs are running well ahead of gains. Uber spent its entire 2026 AI coding budget by April. The heaviest users of these tools may be twice as productive, but they’re burning ten times the tokens of their colleagues.

In a matter of months the conversation has turned from going fast to working out how to rein the spending in, or at least to demonstrate ROI.

“AI has flooded a system built around human-paced development and human-quality code with output it was never designed to absorb. The acceleration is real, but it is deceptive — it masks the strain building at every stage downstream.” - The Acceleration Whiplash, Faros (2026)

And still, the organisation tries to do everything, all at once, avoiding the inconvenient truth about product management: at least half of these initiatives are never going to work. AI can speed up finding the few that pay and killing the rest before they are built.

Survival of the focused

AI did not lift the constraint that matters: the limit on what you can commit your attention and money to. It lowered the cost of finding out what to commit to. Discovery, experimentation, a prototype in an afternoon: telling a good bet from a bad one has never been cheaper or faster.

There’s no need to drown, using AI to build everything at once. Use it to choose what to build. The nine things the team is spread across should be bets, not commitments. They can be reinvented as cheap experiments; most of them can be killed before they cost anything.

Pointed at commitments, AI floods you and bills you. Pointed at discovery, it makes choosing easier than it has ever been.

Growth depends on new bets, and you can chase more of them than ever, because trying them is nearly free now. The WIP limit is a cap on committed work, not a cap on curiosity. Don’t confuse experiments with commitments. Help stakeholders to understand that their requests require prototyping and research; not everything has to go to production.

Explore widely. Commit narrowly. The team that looked slow was never slow; it was a focused organisation that had stopped deciding what not to build.

AI offers the illusion of having it all. The reality is the organisations that thrive will be the ones who use it to explore more and commit to less.