The unit of work changed first.

A team I worked with shipped something that should have needed three or four times its headcount, and none of the usual explanations covered it.

I was running design at GrowthX at the time, and Noord alongside it, so I had this from two directions at once. Inside the team-shape decisions every week, and across a portfolio of companies making the same decisions differently. The gap showed up in both. The product nearest to hand was CheckThat: a small senior team on a surface that used to take a department.

## A gap the usual explanations don't cover

I tried the usual explanations first. They're senior. They're fast. They had a head start. Those cover a 1.5x gap, maybe 2x. They do not cover 4x. Only one explanation fit. The unit of work itself had changed: the amount of finished product one person can carry, on their own, from idea to shipped.

Look at what we never hired. Product surfaces we shipped would have needed three or four discrete roles in 2022: research, design, brand, design systems. We did them with a small senior team. Budget was not the constraint, and sourcing wasn't either. Work had gotten dense enough that extra designers didn't add what they used to.

Engineers got there before the rest of us. Several were already running at that density through 2024. Fewer roles, broader scope inside each. Design organizations were still being planned at the 2022 shape, and a lot of the friction I watched that year came from exactly that lag. We were hiring for a team shape that no longer matched the work.

It changed before the product did. What one designer or engineer can hold has roughly tripled in two years, and the teams adjusted before anything on screen did.

## I said no to all three

My advice has changed, and that is how I know the shift is real. Three founders asked me this quarter whether to hire a second designer. Two years ago I would have said yes without much thought. I said no to all three. Reasoning differed each time. Not yet. Hire one level more senior and don't backfill. Learn the tools well enough to write the spec yourself before you fill the role. Underneath, it was the same advice.

## What it asks of leaders

Now the uncomfortable half, which is what this does to people leading these functions. My own cohort included. For twenty years the deal was that you traded the tools for the org chart: rank meant your hands left the work. That deal has expired. Lead engineering, product or design without being hands-on with the toolset required to ship, or at least visibly learning it, and you will struggle to attract the people who are. Strong builders now size up a leader the way they once sized up a portfolio. They can tell in one conversation whether you have touched the tools or only commissioned slides about them.

I don't say this from a comfortable distance. I went back to shipping production work after years of mostly writing org charts. The first months were humbling in the specific way that matters. My taste had kept current. My hands had not. Closing that gap changed my advice more than any market map did. Put everything into the judgment only a person can supply, and let the machine fill the gaps. Teams built that way are small because nothing is missing from them.

## Late together

Here is what makes a shift like this hard to feel. You can be quite late and not notice, because so is everyone you talk to. Talking to other people is how most of us work out where we stand, and in a shift like this it stops working. Everyone is catching up at once, so the room agrees, and the agreement tells you nothing.

Teams that adjusted earliest are a year to eighteen months ahead, and you cannot see that lead from outside. It doesn't look like speed. It looks like a company that is oddly relaxed about headcount. The spread between earliest and latest is wider than I would have guessed, and almost none of it is legible from a conference talk or a product launch.

I know the shape of that lag because I was in it. Through 2023 and most of 2024 I assumed the first big effect would land on what companies shipped: new interactions, new product shapes, new categories. Made by roughly the teams that made the previous wave, just faster. I picked the error up honestly. My own output sped up a lot through 2023, and I extrapolated from one person to organizations. One senior person speeding up tells you nothing about what happens to a team's work. I never asked the more interesting question, which is what happens when one person can hold what used to take three.

Outside design and engineering that belief was closer to right. Sales, marketing and support did change at the output layer first. Buyers got AI-written copy, agents in the loop and summarized tickets long before those organizations got visibly smaller. Making and distributing are not the same thing, and I generalized across the two. The compression in making landed on the team before it landed on the product, and I spent about eighteen months advising founders out of the wrong model.

Most of the AI products people use in 2026 still look a lot like the AI products of 2024. A more important difference sits behind them. Teams are smaller and more senior than they were. Product shapes will follow. They usually do.

I led design at GrowthX, and run Noord, an AI Design Lab that occasionally invests in startups. This could date badly. Every tooling shift in memory produced a season of small-team triumphalism, and the org chart grew back once the novelty premium faded. If that happens again this essay becomes a period piece.