Over the next 1-4 months, every Senior Engineer can have output equivalent to a whole team in 2025. This moves the bottleneck to Product/Engineering Leadership and the CxO team.

We’re going to need organisational change; Level 4 Agentic Orchestration is just shining an even brighter light on what we’ve always known was central to success: Clarity of purpose, and shared understanding.

Yes, there’s still real work to do in Engineering teams to embed the L4 Orch tech, but it’s now obvious to me there’s even more change required in Senior Leadership / Executive teams to get traction with all this new horsepower, otherwise it’ll just be a lot of spinning tyres.

Now that Level 4 AI Engineering (Loop Orchestration) means each software engineer will have a slew of agents usefully tackling different stages of the SDLC, the bottleneck is now on how effectively we can empower these new Senior Software Engineers / Agent Team Leads to have velocity (speed + direction), not just “go fast”.

The teams I’m working with who are most advanced with their AI Engineering transition in 2026 are coming at this both bottom-up and top-down:

  1. Bottom-up: Senior Engineer roles now get even deeper immersion in the “Why”
  2. Top-down: Heads of, VPs and CxO roles are evolving to spend more time on clearer definition and communication of the “Why”.

Our goal here is to keep our feedback loops tight and our proscriptive processess to a minimum, as this will enable the pushing of autonomy and control further down the org chart where the work is getting done 4x-10x faster than before.

  1. Strategy: Have a clear Strategy (a unique hypothesis on Where your growth will come from, that evolves over a specific When). Preferably it fits on a page. Nobody reads a 36-page strat document.

  2. Measures: Instrument the strat with clear Measures of Value (preferably Leading Indicators like the KFUs that measure how our product is generating value for each customer today), and go easy on the trailing indicators like Churn and Revenue. They’re downstream of what Customers (and Engineers) need.

  3. Roadmap: We’re going 4-10x faster, so our 2025 approach no longer works. Engineers now come into these conversations. We centre the conversation around the dials we want to turn, and which direction we want to turn them, and how that connects to the organisation’s strategy (our unique hypothesis on where growth comes from).

We can now raise Epics with dramatically leaner specs, as we know what success looks like (by engaging our engineers with the “Why”), we can push basically all of the “What” down to engineers too.

Do your engineers understand the Strategy? Do your engineers understand the Measures that instrument it? Do your Measures represent genuine value for Customers? Do your Roadmap Epics connect directly to the Measures?

If not, this is probably going to be more important over the coming months than the literal adoption of the L4 tools by your Senior Engineers.

More to come.