96% of technologists I asked said that smart engineering leadership is more important in teams with successful AI tooling.
On Saturday I hosted a session at Polyglot Software Unconference here in Vancouver where I asked about 50 technologists about engineering leadership in the age of AI.
We mapped out the shift: teams are moving away from supervision and administration tasks, and pushing higher into strategic management and leadership functions.
🛠️ Leaders are accountable for managing vendors, budgeting, compliance, and tool infrastructure. If your team is going to act like a team, they should be able to trust and share a good tooling environment.
📈 AI coding represents a massive retooling and reskilling; teams need coordination to help with tool uptake, best practices, and guardrails to ensure forward progress. Leaders are responsible for ensuring this is in place.
🎯 Teams are already using AI code agents to build far more speculative and prototypical systems and features. Good leaders will be aligning intentions, filtering experiments, and elevating key results.
🚀 Regardless of tooling, the team will have more output if they can observe, orient, decide, and act smoothly on clear and consistent signals from their environment. When the environment moves faster, the coordination layer bears more load.
If every role on the team shifts upward on the leadership spectrum, the question isn't whether you need leaders - it's whether your leaders are ready to lead this kind of team, or if they're stuck in a rut like a mechanical workflow. Am I biased here? Tell me your predictions.