Over my career, the ask from leadership has been pretty consistent: more development capacity. The list of requests never shrinks, so the conclusion is always the same: we need to go faster. AI is now delivering on that in ways hiring never quite could.
The list will always outpace the team. That’s not a capacity problem, it’s the nature of the work.
What I haven’t seen is a matching increase in clarity about which parts of the work actually matter.
Capacity without direction is just faster drift. You ship more, but you’re not sure what’s landing. You don’t know which features people actually use, or which ones drove engagement.
There’s an infinite supply of “can we build this?” The constraint that’s always been scarce is “should we build this at all?”
That second question is worth more than it gets credit for. Every feature you don’t build is scope your team doesn’t carry: no implementation cost, no maintenance burden, no support tickets, no documentation. The savings compound in ways that never show up on a roadmap because there’s nothing to point at.
The gains from AI make this more urgent. When capacity goes up, the temptation is to fill it. But the better return is a leaner organization pointed at fewer, more deliberate bets.
More “can we measure whether this mattered?” would help too. But it starts with being willing to ask whether to build it at all.
Kevin E. Schlabach 