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Multiply Your Team With AI

5 min read

Tech Lead

Your team's AI fluency is your responsibility. Standards, training, and 'here's how I do it' — you set the tone.

Eng Manager

You don't need to be the best AI user. You need to ensure your team has access, guidance, and permission to experiment.

Platform

Platform teams enable everyone. Add 'AI tooling standards' to your mandate. You're the force multiplier for the whole org.

Multiply Your Team With AI

TL;DR

  • One Staff engineer who enables 10 people to use AI effectively beats one Staff engineer who codes alone. Your leverage is through your team.
  • Set standards: what tools, what workflows, what review process. Then get out of the way. Enable, don't gatekeep.
  • Yuki's team is shrinking. Making the remaining people 2x more effective is the only way to keep velocity.

Yuki's team got smaller. Leadership expects the same (or more) output. The lever: AI. But AI doesn't adopt itself. Someone has to set the standard and show the way. That someone is her.

Be the Pioneer (Then Scale)

  • Use AI yourself. You can't advocate for what you don't use. Model the behavior. Show the workflow.
  • Document it. "Here's how I use Cursor for code review." "Here's my prompt for RFC drafts." Make it reusable. Your team will copy.
  • Create permission. Some orgs are wary. Be the person who says "we're doing this" and backs it up with results. One success story opens the door.

Standards Over Chaos

Without guidance, everyone invents their own AI workflow. Some good, some bad. Your job: define the floor.

  • What tools are approved?
  • What's the review process for AI-generated code?
  • What's encouraged vs. discouraged?

Keep it simple. Two pages max. Update as you learn. The goal is consistency, not perfection.

Measure (Loosely)

You don't need a rigorous ROI study. You need a signal. "Are we shipping faster? Are fewer bugs slipping through?" Qualitative is fine. "Before/after AI adoption" stories are enough to justify more investment.

Quick Check

Yuki's team got smaller. Leadership expects the same output. What's the lever?

Everyone invents their own AI workflow. Some good, some bad. No standards. Chaos. 'Can we use Cursor?' 'I don't know, ask security.' Velocity is flat.

Click "Standards" to see the difference →

Do This Next

  1. Write a one-pager for your team: "How we use AI tools." Include: approved tools, review expectations, one example workflow. Share it. Iterate.
  2. Run one "AI show and tell" — 15 minutes in a team meeting. Demonstrate your workflow. Invite questions. Make it normal.