I did something this week that made half my leadership team want to mutiny.
I told every single person on my team, regardless of role, that they need to ship something to production next quarter. Account managers. Marketing. Commercial leads. Everyone. Including me!
Not a side project. Not a sandbox exercise. Something real. Something we use.
And before you tell me that's unreasonable, let me tell you what already happened.
One of my account managers, a commercial (account manager) guy with zero engineering background, built an app that the entire team now uses on their phones. It tracks our hours and AI utilization in real time. Before this, we had to log into our laptops and navigate through systems just to check where we stood for the week. Now I glance at my phone. Done.
He sends me screenshots on weekends of the updates he's making. We created a monster. A beautiful, productive, code-shipping monster.
Here's what I told my team: I don't care if it's one line of code. I don't care if it's a tiny UI fix. I don't care if it's a PDF export button a customer asked for on a call yesterday. But you will ship something.
My product lead pushed back. He said it's a vanity metric. That we have bigger priorities. And he's not wrong about the priorities. But he's wrong about the vanity part.
Think about what it means when your entire team can ship code. Your account manager gets off a customer call where someone says "I wish this thing could export to PDF." Instead of logging a ticket that sits in a backlog for six months, he builds it. That night. Ships it the next morning. That's not a vanity metric. That's a competitive weapon.
The barrier to building is gone.
I've written code for the first time in 25 years of being in product. I built a website in one night. Is it the prettiest thing in the world? No. But it's live. It's on Vercel. It works. And if I can do it, my team can do it.
My product lead, who was a ChatGPT holdout until two weeks ago (I gave him endless grief about it), texted me this week and said Claude Code has gotten good enough to bridge his lack of skill. His words. The tools have caught up to the ambition.
Now, am I saying my sales guy should be pushing features to our flagship product without review? No. There are stage gates. Product management can decline anything. But everyone should be able to look at something broken and say: I can fix that.
We landed on this: everyone builds one thing that's part of our AI operations work this quarter. The stretch goal is that it goes into an actual product. Some people will get there. Some won't. But by Q3 or Q4, I want every person on this team capable of shipping something a customer can use.
My EOS coach looked at me like I was insane. I told him: you want something done, give it to a busy person.
We're about to acquire a company that could double our size. We're building playbooks. We're restructuring how we use AI across every function. And on top of all of that, I'm asking people to learn to code.
Because if we don't push now, we never will. And the companies that figure this out first win. Not eventually. Now.
FITFO moment of the week: Pick one person on your team who has never written a line of code. Tell them to build something this weekend with Claude Code. Anything. A tool, an app, a dashboard. Watch what happens to their confidence on Monday morning.