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"The process acts more like a home base. When we stray from our path, we know where to come back to."
"AI moves towards the average. And average is oftentimes better than what most people have. But it doesn't get you to good."
"If your product is so simple you can throw it together with AI coding, you've got to expect competition."
Grown Up Product is the podcast for founders, CEOs, and investors navigating the mess that follows product-market fit.
Hosted by Rooted In Product founder and Fractional Chief Product Officer Brian Root, the show dispenses with the platitudes about scaling and gets to the substance: how to build product organizations that don't just survive the short-term, but thrive in the long-term. You won’t hear process theater or recycled frameworks. You’ll get the logic behind the methods: the mistakes, the confrontations, the actual tradeoffs required. It’s not just success stories, but the challenges and choices that make progress possible.
Each week, Brian talks with leaders who’ve stepped into chaotic, high-stakes environments and left behind systems that worked: teams that got sharper, product that got better, and decisions that created lasting advantages.
If you’re a founder past product-market fit wondering what comes next, a CEO frustrated by product inertia, or an investor watching a portfolio company stall out, this podcast gives you a front-row seat to how durable product organizations actually get built.
Welcome to Grown Up Product, the podcast for founders, CEOs, and investors who have moved past the early stage scramble and now face the realities of product development. If you're tired chasing the latest trends and want real stories about what works and what doesn't in product leadership, you're in the right spot. We talk with people who've done the hard work, made the tough calls, and could share what really happens as companies grow up. Today's guest is Chris Kincannon, fractional CTO and cofounder of Ready Steady. Chris has spent years working with high growth startups and their investors, helping them scale product and engineering without burning everyone out.
Brian Root:He's seen the chaos that comes with rapid growth and knows how to help teams find their footing again. If you're a founder or CEO trying to level up your product org or you just wanna get out of the bottleneck yourself, Chris has been there and done that. Let's get into it. Chris, welcome.
Chris Kincanon:Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Brian Root:Yeah. Absolutely. So I'm a fractional CPO. You're a fractional CTO. We we do overlap, obviously, in a lot of ways.
Brian Root:And I think fractional is a very new and and kind of burgeoning job description, if you will. I am curious just for our listeners, if you can give a little bit of context. What does fractional mean, and how did you get into being a fractional CTO yourself?
Chris Kincanon:Yeah. Sure. You know, as far as how I got into fractional CTO, it's been, like, a steady career progression for me. I started my career early on doing consulting. I was originally at Accenture when I left college and got a really great start and understanding of what it meant to come in and move needles from them.
Chris Kincanon:Right? Because we didn't come in. We didn't achieve goals. If we didn't meet deadlines, we weren't doing our job. From there, as much as I loved jumbling through different products, I started looking for something that I could, like, really sink my teeth into and moved into the startup world.
Chris Kincanon:Did some educational startups, built some LMSs and those kinds of things, and really got to sink my teeth into not just getting a product up and off the ground, but what it took to stabilize a team, build a team for continual growth. From there, I I sought out stronger challenges, bigger companies, larger problems, harder needles to move in a lot of ways. And as I moved my through my career, it became important to stabilize that process and not just internally to an engineering team, but also, as you mentioned, to reach out to product, to marketing, to sales, to legal, all these different departments and build those bridges into the engineering group so that we could make sure we were building the right product together. Worked my way up all the way through large corporations, Workhole, Unity, and really got a chance to hone and and battle test my ideas and process. And when I came out of the end of that pipeline, I had a really great product owner that I was working with, Lisa Hagen.
Chris Kincanon:And we decided to go ahead and start our own business because we felt like we had the experience and the process that a lot of like early stage companies needed to build products right. And we had a semblance of what could look like, which was something that we were running into a lot in our endeavors. It wasn't that the team couldn't do what we needed them to do. It's just they just really didn't know the pattern. And so when we started talking about founding the company, we ran across Factional, a CTO, CPO, those kinds of roles.
Chris Kincanon:And we recognize that those were companies that needed help but couldn't afford or oftentimes didn't feel like they need a full time person in that position. Those people were either hesitant as to what those roles could get them or they lack the understanding of like what those roles entailed. Developing a product on paper. Writing it in code is very, very expensive
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Chris Kincanon:In my opinion. And oftentimes, a lot of the work can be done through iteration on mock ups or they can be done through iteration with customer communication or those kinds of things. Right? And so when me and Lisa started talking about all this, we felt that, like, the fractional position was a good place for us to strike because we had those patterns and processes. We knew how to come in and help elevate those teams.
Chris Kincanon:We knew how to, engage with the leadership in a way that we understood that they didn't need the full process. Right? Like, they're not corporations. They're they're not trying to manage, you know, 50 to 500 people. And so we see the fractional position as a way to spread our knowledge and experience very simply and fill gaps that are needed in the industry.
Chris Kincanon:We believe that getting in with companies either early on in a scaling event or early on in their production in general allows us to build in the standards and processes that are required for good company culture. Because that a lot of times is where companies fall down. They get busy. They start making compromises. Standards get fuzzy.
Chris Kincanon:Right? And people don't know how to act properly. And so things slow down.
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Chris Kincanon:Having those processes in place, having clarity around the roles, having clarity around the way that information flows through your company enables the workers to build up themselves. Right? Allows them to join those standards and augment those standards that eventually create the company culture. Earlier on in that process, earlier on in that shift or scaling event that you can catch up to those kinds of things and make sure that those standards don't slip, the better you're gonna weather those transitions.
Brian Root:Yeah. So process, I think, can be a dirty word to some founders, some CEOs. Right? We probably, you know, had 10 people, you know, click exit as many you said that, unfortunately. I I I'd like to dig into a little bit about what process means to you, at least in this context.
Brian Root:Right? How do you know what good looks like, and how do you know when you have too little process or too much process?
Chris Kincanon:Yeah. One of the major symptoms that we usually see, especially early on, is a lack of clarity. And then the lack of clarity doesn't just look like we're not really sure what to do. I mean, that's common, right, for businesses. A lack of clarity has to do with how do we do our business?
Chris Kincanon:Is this my responsibility as an as an employee? Or is this somebody else's responsibility? Am I stepping on toes? Right? And what we advocate for is just enough process to provide that clarity and make sure that people stay on the same page.
Chris Kincanon:The reason why we focus on kind of like the early stage of a product development or a scaling event is because that we've noticed that those are the two places where the confusion shows up. The fuzziness shows up. Right? We start making trade offs like for speed and cost against, like, quality, and people aren't really sure how to, like, push back, or they're not really quite sure how to, like, communicate back up the chain to where, we're like, hey. Like, we're sacrificing too much quality here, or isn't really gonna give you the cost savings you were hoping for.
Chris Kincanon:And so what you don't want is, like, kind of like this machine like process, right, that, like, removes all the thinking Yeah. From the people. Right? Yep. The the process really is about not about getting work done.
Chris Kincanon:It's about how we get work done as a cultural and a business. Right? And through that, like, what do we value? Are we really just like a machine that's, like, trying to pump out a product as much as possible? And that's just like the the culture of our company.
Chris Kincanon:Or are we looking for the best product? Are we looking for the one that resonates best with our users? I don't think that a lot of companies understand that they're making decisions on those levels.
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Chris Kincanon:That's where we push for product to get involved is to try to help curate that conversation. And it really permeates the rest of your business. It's about your product market fit. It's about who is your real audience because you can't just be like, well, we appeal to everybody. So how do we intentionally make those decisions?
Chris Kincanon:And then how do we bake that decision making into our process? Right? And so the the process that I'm talking about isn't like this micromanaging. We tell you how to get things done. It's really about installing guardrails and checkpoints is the way that we talk about it.
Chris Kincanon:Right? To where, like, we we know that we can't boil the ocean. Right? But how do we communicate with the rest of the company focus? Right?
Chris Kincanon:And we do that through, like, putting in guardrails. We say, we know that we're interested in these things, but we also know that we're not interested in these things. And it's important to call that out intentionally, right, to where we're actively saying we're not pursuing this. Because otherwise, it's always kind of like in the back of our heads. Like, could do this Mhmm.
Chris Kincanon:And it ends up being a distraction. We can always shift those guardrails if the market changes or we're discovering through application development that there's more opportunity than we thought in that direction. It really is important to have those guardrails in place for focus. Right?
Brian Root:Yep. So I I think when people hear process, they often think automation efficiency. I I hear you saying to some extent though process as a way of ensuring people can slow down and think.
Chris Kincanon:Right. Yeah. And I would say, like, the other big point here is just, like, checkpoints. Right? Like, I think that a lot of people, you know, think about, like, metrics when we talk about process and things like that.
Chris Kincanon:Or KPIs, which is, in another, like, kind of, like, semi bad word. Sure. Or at least one we don't enjoy, I would say. But I think that the, checkpoints that we wanna build in are more trend centric. It's usually what we say.
Chris Kincanon:Like, we we tend to ask people to think about them as the canary in the mind shaft. We don't wanna spend a ton of time thinking too hard about the the metrics. But what we do wanna do is understand what levers we're trying to pull. Again, it's that intentionality. We're not just expecting the metrics to tell us what we need to focus on.
Chris Kincanon:We're supposed to be taking intentional steps towards outcomes that we're looking to achieve, right, within our within our product, within our user base, you know, wherever it may lie. And I think that when it comes to like the checkpoints, the checkpoint should act more like the canaries in the mineshaft to where they should give us an idea when things are going in the wrong direction, or we're not pulling that lever hard enough, or we're not expecting we're not getting the outcome that we're expecting as clearly. So I agree. Like, a lot of times, I I have to call it process, but I agree that there's bad sentiment towards it. And that's something that me and Lisa do work towards.
Chris Kincanon:We don't want it to be a dirty word. We want people to engage with it because we believe that that's again part of a good culture. You can affect the process. You can pull it out and you can observe it. You can rely that people are like doing these things.
Chris Kincanon:And that's what you can rely on as you build out your section of the process. And so a lot of things that we like kind of advocate for, we try to focus on the interaction between leadership, the product team, and engineering because me and Lisa are in a little bit of a unique perspect situation to where we cover both sides of that gap. And myself and Lisa have a lot of belief that, like, getting product and engineering working in sync is the secret sauce. As well as other, you know, cohorts design and QA and project management when you have larger and larger teams. But that core connecting the people that can do with the people that are figuring out what to do is the secret sauce.
Chris Kincanon:And then keeping that focus on the on the leadership level while those two sections are figuring things out.
Brian Root:I think there's been a lot of very popular trends, things like founder mode recently that the the the general tenor of them has been, the individual should rise above all of the problems that they are experiencing at the company. And if there is no process, then just smash through the walls, get shit done. I don't know if I'm allowed to put on a podcast, but there you go. I I'm curious how you see that. I mean, obviously, that's a bit of a a counterpoint or a different perspective to what you're articulating.
Brian Root:How much of that is true within what you were trying to instill at companies? How much room do a plus level individuals or whatever you're gonna call them need to be able to ignore everything you're doing and just get shit done versus how much does everybody need to absolutely conform to the process as is?
Chris Kincanon:Yeah. And the the process should be something that, like, the teams wanna engage with. Right? Like, it should be their normals. Right?
Chris Kincanon:And the idea there is to set standards through process. Right? Like, the idea that, like, if we do skip a step, right, like, which is like normal. Right? Like, we do it intentionally and it's through a conversation with the group.
Chris Kincanon:Right? We say like, this is a small enough thing that maybe we don't we don't need to do like a full product write up on it or something like that. Like, we're happy to prototype this and then let's have a product write up or something like that. There's always exceptions to those those norms and the process acts more like a home base. When we stray from our path or we need to do something different or weird, we know where to come back to as well.
Chris Kincanon:Mhmm. But it's really about setting those standards within the the development world. We call it engineering excellence. But there's other versions of that that exist in like the producting world and the marketing world and stuff. How do we get those all to like connect and communicate with each other?
Chris Kincanon:Overall, I I feel like there has to be a process. Otherwise, you're just expecting people to continually rise to the occasion the occasion. And what ends up happening is that some people can do that and some people can't. And there's no support for the people that can't and the people that can get frustrated because they need the other people around them to be able to do the same. And so what ends up happening is there's that that standards mismatch.
Chris Kincanon:And that's how you lose high performing talent, in my opinion. I mean, I've heard a million people tell me why they've left left their jobs and sometimes like a bad boss. But what it really comes down to with the bad boss is their standards weren't higher than mine or they weren't equal to mine. And so I was constantly fighting with this person that was supposed to be my leadership about standards. And they they eventually just give up and quit.
Chris Kincanon:They go look for someone else that's willing to raise their quality bar.
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Chris Kincanon:Sometimes that's the right choice. Every company needs to go through the process of thinking through the iron triangle of quality, cost, and speed and understand where what they're looking for. And then they really should find people that match that energy. Because, you know, for myself and Lisa, quality is a high standard for us. We think that, you know, putting out a product that delights your users, that's easy to use and thought through is like key to being successful.
Chris Kincanon:And we are realistic about the cost and the speed at which we can do those things. That doesn't mean that like we won't compromise. Yep. You can see that through our like website, like bereadysteady.com. We talk a lot about the importance of quality.
Chris Kincanon:We come in and help you raise that standard, help you raise that quality bar. We help you resonate with your user and focus on the outcomes. You know, like those are the things that we go out there and like we kind of are proponents for. And I think when you adopt that move fast and break things mentality, there's a time and place for that. But I don't think that that's what you want your normal operating mode to be.
Chris Kincanon:Because if there's chaos on that level within your company, that chaos is gonna filter up to you as like a leader. And, you're gonna end up in a situation to where either your leadership becomes the only decision maker in the company because everybody's just moving fast and breaking things, or the quality of the product's gonna slip and you're gonna frustrate your user base, or, you know, you end up, like, in a analysis paralysis mode to where, like, nobody's communicating, everybody's just doing what they want, and there's nobody, like, really putting work together to do the major lift.
Brian Root:Right? I think what what you're articulating, I mean, certainly resonates with me. I I grew up as a musician. To me, the the metaphor is is jazz. Everybody needs to be playing the same song and, you know, working from the same set of shared principles, know their role within the quartet, but there's absolutely room for riffing.
Brian Root:And it's actually the shared structure that facilitates the riff. It's not not that inhibits it. But to your point, you know, not everybody gets a solo. Right? It's not something that has to be, let's say, earned through proving that it adds value.
Brian Root:It's an interesting tension, though, and particularly in how we talk about it as fractionals. Because if you go in with we're gonna put in some structure, but not too much in just a little bit, and people can still do it's gets very hand waving very quickly. So I I think it is easier to talk about the structure first and then loosen it, at least in in my experience, than the opposite.
Chris Kincanon:Yeah. I mean, I think I think the music example is great because, like, you can all play the same note even, But then it's not quite right. Like, not everything's really in tune. Yes. You know, like, that's like one of the first thing, like, my kid my kid's in band.
Chris Kincanon:Mhmm. And that's one of the first thing they taught them to do was listen, not play. Right? So that you can hear the people around you and you can kind of, like, even out that tone and, you know, get on the same page. And that's a lot of like what we do when we come in.
Chris Kincanon:Right? This is like, that's really like, I feel like a big part of our goal is to help start that product organization if it's not there or help bring that product organization more into its own so that it can start being the thing that helps bring everybody on the same page.
Brian Root:So you you mentioned earlier, you know, kind of an adherence to quality, you know, at least as as one of the values that you, you know, really are are are keen to to uphold, you at the companies that you're working with. I I think, you know, putting on my foundry in 2025 hat, almost everything again that you're reading on LinkedIn these days is quality doesn't matter. Vibe code your way to something. Doesn't matter what it is. Just throw it out there, and then some magic process will happen afterwards to make it better and actually, you know, customer friendly, etcetera, which I love that that part always gets glossed over.
Brian Root:But obviously, that is very, again, kind of at odds with the the current with the flavor of the moment. I I I'm curious to kinda get your learned experience as to why that is the case. Right? I think it's somebody new to product may look at that and say, yeah. Velocity sounds awesome.
Brian Root:I can ship something tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Why doesn't that work in your experience?
Chris Kincanon:Yeah. We could do a whole another episode on byte coding, in my opinion on that. I mean, being very closely tied to the engineering group, I have a very I would say, have a lot of opinions on where and how AI should, be used within the software creation process. Right? And again, like, not just to talk about, like, the development thing, but more like, you know, we're seeing product people build product documents using AI and things like that.
Chris Kincanon:And I do think that those tools have a, role to play in all of this. Right? They can they can really lead to strong productivity gains if they're introduced in the right way and they're treated correctly. Mhmm. I would say this this idea that, like, I can just vibe code my way into a a successful product is not correct.
Chris Kincanon:I think that the AI coding gets you to, like, a certain echelon, and it's really, like, around, like, prototype. Right? And I I agree. Like, early stage prototyping, you know, quality bar is not super important. I've got like maybe a handful of beta testers.
Chris Kincanon:Maybe I'm like launched, soft launched kind of in a place. Like all of that's kind of okay. Right? Like, but those time periods are much shorter, I would say, than what most people expect. Really, like once you kinda get like some paying customers on there, like you get your momentum, you really only get like one chance at a first impression.
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Chris Kincanon:Right? And you really don't wanna lose momentum because you're fixing things or you're trying to build up features that event like you found out we're missing and those kinds of things. And so there's to me a balance of like, again, like how much did I think through this? How much did I test this? How much did we talk about it on paper?
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Chris Kincanon:Before we get even like even even a prototype involved. Right? Because even if we can throw one together, the damage isn't in cost. It could be in reputation. It could be in experience and negative reviews and those kinds of things.
Chris Kincanon:Right? And if your product is something that is so simple that you can just throw it together with like some AI coding, you've got to expect competition. Right? Somebody's gonna see the idea and carry it four levels higher faster than you can. Right?
Chris Kincanon:Or something like that. Or they're gonna see your idea and understand the right market to put it in and beat you to it. Mhmm. Right? And so this idea that like, I just prototype and throw it up there and then if I build it, they'll come.
Chris Kincanon:Like, I've just not seen that work. Right? And it while it can get you that fast prototype, it can get you to that marketing stage much faster. It's not gonna solve that marketing stage kinda like what you said. Right?
Chris Kincanon:To where, like, you then have to go out there and, like, find your user base and do all the work of, like, figuring out like where your product market fit is and how you like scope it down and find the right features to add to the application to meet that product market fit. I just haven't seen it. I haven't seen it come out of, you know, like the vibe coding. I haven't seen it come out of even like trying to work with the AI on a product level. Right?
Chris Kincanon:But what it can do is, certainly support people that already have those skills. Right? Myself as like a developer, I use Cloud Code, to do personal projects and fun things like that. You know, I I totally advocate that, developers out there right now should be learning how to use AI tooling. It's not gonna go away.
Chris Kincanon:Right? And I think that in the hands of people that already know, it becomes a multiplier. Right? And I think that's true on the product side as well, not just the engineering side. Certainly, you know, myself and Lisa have been able to very quickly come up and throw like ideas against the wall using ChatTP or Claude or any of those kinds of systems and kind of like be able to process our own ideas much faster, less iteration, those kinds of things.
Chris Kincanon:It can't help us generate the ideas. It can't help us find the markets. You know, it's just not that sophisticated yet. Yep. So yeah.
Chris Kincanon:So I don't I don't particularly think that you can stand up an entire company just with the AI. However, empowering the people that you have available to you through AI can certainly save on the need to hire early on, the need for more cost early on. It can certainly get you prototyping and seeing your own idea and using it much more early on and those kinds of things. I think that the big hits to where, like, you hear, I vibe coded something in a weekend. I stood it up and now I'm making, you know, $2,500,000 or whatever.
Chris Kincanon:I think that has more to do with, you know, that market positioning that I knew the right people. I hit the right market. I posted in the right spot, you know, and it's it goes back to kind of like the unicorn startups, you know, from like early two thousand, some things like that to where it really just ended up being it didn't have anything to do with like, oh, I vibe coded it. It had to do with being in the right spot in the right time, which product is what can help you actually build towards that versus needing to rely on the lock in my opinion.
Brian Root:Yeah. It's it's an interesting mix in my mind. Right? If when you see examples like that, I think it's first of all, again, my my you know, early training was in game theory, so I always think about this as, like, what is the bias that's in play here? Right?
Brian Root:And that's a very much a a bias of of picking out only the winners of the giant pool of thousands of other companies that probably did do exactly tried to do exactly the same thing and didn't succeed. Right? So you're you're looking only at the the winner and saying, oh, this works. Right? Or is that is is very misrepresentative of the whole.
Brian Root:But I wonder how much even that approach of just pushing AI, even as as a as a component of your team, starts to feed into just emphasis on velocity. We don't have to do the UX research. We don't have to do the design thinking. We can just mock up six prototypes, throw them all out into, you know, a a testing environment, and let the results speak for themselves. And right?
Brian Root:So over time, the thing that I'm really trying to think about from a product perspective is how does that or does that degrade kind of the the inherent skills that very talented professionals I've worked with tons of who have developed over time to help us from a human perspective understand what goods it looks like and how do we get to something that is more likely to work before we have to hit that engineering stage. I don't know what that dynamic looks like, but, know, if I could put you on the spot and hand you a crystal ball, like, what do what do you think that looks like in ten years at a good company, to be clear?
Chris Kincanon:Yeah. I mean, I mean, I don't know. Ten years is it feels like forever away at this point. You know what I mean? And the speed things are going.
Chris Kincanon:I mean, I I do believe that the, AI tooling will continue to grow. I think that it's important that people understand that, good looks different to an expert versus somebody that's not an expert on a subject. Right? And so to me, what I always try to remind myself when it comes to the AI is the AI moves towards the average. Right?
Chris Kincanon:And average is oftentimes better than what most people have. And I think that that's also an important thing to admit and understand. Right? But it doesn't get you to good. Right?
Chris Kincanon:Like, I don't I don't think that the AI currently has a way to distinguish between the average and excellence. Right? Mhmm. Just kind of like knowing the entire internals of how that AI works, you know, it's always gonna head towards the average. So, I always tell people it's a great place to start.
Chris Kincanon:Right? If you if you don't feel like you know or if you don't feel like you're you're sure and you wanna test your ideas, go bounce them off the AI. Right? One of the one of the world's best rubber ducks right now. But I think that if you're getting to a place to where it's making decisions.
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Chris Kincanon:Right? Like, that's where I would, like, checkpoint. Right? And be like, you know, where is this leading me? Like, what are we thinking?
Chris Kincanon:Like, is this gelling with my idea of, like, what this company was gonna do or what this project was going to do? Or is it drawing me to its conclusion? Right? Which I think is the inherent danger there. You know, like, that's why I I tend to, like, advocate that it's like, you know, I think, like, Claude code, for example, or a cursor, one of the other, like, coding AIs is best used in the hands of developers.
Chris Kincanon:Right? Because they have a semblance of what good looks like from a coding perspective. Right? And like it's like, I wouldn't expect like, you know, like my mom to be able to use like Cloud Code and produce something good because Right. She really doesn't know.
Chris Kincanon:Right?
Brian Root:Yep.
Chris Kincanon:However, you know, it's going to if my mom did wanna produce something, it would be way better than my mom sitting down and trying to code it herself. Right? So that's kinda what I'm talking about to where like it moves you towards average and average is oftentimes much better than what you can currently do. But I think to get to that good or to great or to excellence even. Right?
Chris Kincanon:Like, you've really gotta put that tool in the hands of people that already know what those things look like.
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Chris Kincanon:So that it can either contour the AI's output or it can reject the AI's output and say, like, this isn't the direction we're trying to go in or this isn't what we're thinking about or, you know, this is a good idea, but it's, like, not gonna work because x y z. Right? And when you start getting that feedback loop with the AI, now you're empowering that person, right, is the way that I see it. And so yeah. So, you know, the the danger there is just don't abscond the decision making, you know.
Chris Kincanon:And the other, you know, big piece of that is is what does good look like? Are you sure you know? Right? And that's something that that's something that like me and Lisa have done on a that kind of like shorter term contract basis is come in and help teams establish that good. Like, what that good looks like while they're onboarding AI tooling and things like that to try to bring up the productivity speed.
Chris Kincanon:Right? I think that that's a a great thought pairing, right, to where, like, you're realizing that you don't want the AI to just be taking over decision making or whatnot. Mhmm. But at the same time, you're recognizing that, like, maybe yourself or your current company setup doesn't know how to set those standards. Right?
Chris Kincanon:And like, there's that word again. Like, we're going back to like that standards, you know, like, how do you how do you put the guardrails on? Right? And we've seen a lot of success with that kind of stuff. Because like I said, like, to me, there's there's two pushes out there when it comes to AI.
Chris Kincanon:Right? There's a push to like put AI in products. Right? Like every product's gotta have like an agent or something that you can talk to that like helps you navigate the site or something like that. And I'm not overly sold on that side of things to where I feel like every application needs AI.
Chris Kincanon:It should really just be used where it makes sense rather than something that like we wanna do to, you know, keep up with the trend. I think that when you introduce AI and it doesn't make sense to the user and ends up just being very costly and provides no value. And yes, you get to check off the checkbox. But at the same time, you're lowering your quality. Right?
Brian Root:But you're making your CEO happy.
Chris Kincanon:Well, I mean
Brian Root:So there's
Chris Kincanon:are the hard conversations we gotta have with our CEOs. Right? Yep. But I do think that there's a whole another half to the conversation out there, which is like, what does it look like professionally to be using AI tools to do your job? Right?
Chris Kincanon:And, again, I think that, you know, like, I wrote a blog article at the 2004. Man, like, that's almost been a year now, to where I talked to a whole bunch of CTOs, people that I've known and kind of got a sense of, like, what what's going on in their world. AI kept coming up over and over again. Mhmm. You know, back in late two thousand four, it was the conversation was heavily about, you know, my CEO is telling me we gotta get on this AI train.
Chris Kincanon:Like, how do we get on this AI train?
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Chris Kincanon:You know, like, kept asking. I was like, well, do you mean, like, AI in your product or AI on your team? And they're just like, yes. And so I developed this conversation that I would have with them. It's like, well, have you put like, it's just like any other piece of technology.
Chris Kincanon:Have you put in a working model? Like, have you told talked to people about, like, how to use these tools? Or are you just giving them access to them? Right? And for me, to be successful with, like, the AI tooling within the employee set, you have to treat it just like any other new piece of software.
Chris Kincanon:They've gotta receive training. Right? There has to be a conversate an ongoing conversation about like how we're using the tooling. And there's some kind of sharing of like, hey, learned this trick or I've learned that trick or those kinds of things. And so I find like that world much, much more interesting because we're talking again about like kinda like that iron triangle and like, how do we get less cost?
Chris Kincanon:How do we get more speed while maintaining that quality?
Brian Root:Yeah.
Chris Kincanon:And that becomes definitely more interesting. Yep.