You build a prototype in a few hours. It works, it solves the problem, it's ready to test. But the days pass: product wants it for next quarter, design suggests tweaks, business wants to squeeze more out of it, legal reviews the terms, compliance says it's risky, marketing wants to align the messaging, CX fears a spike in tickets. Nobody's saying no. Nobody's blocking. But time dissolves between chats, meetings, and approvals.
And that's when a cost that often goes unseen appears-because in many organizations, it has no clear owner: the cost of coordinating.
In the age of AI, execution is no longer the challenge. The hard part is everything that happens before and after. Building something is no longer expensive. Deciding what to build-and getting everyone to understand it the same way-is what's still expensive.
A few years ago, heavy coordination made sense. Building was slow, costly, and fragile. You had to be sure before you started, because changing something later could mean weeks of rework. Rigorous planning was a way to avoid chaos. But now, with tools that let you spin up a feature, test it, and tweak it in hours, that model falls short.
The problem isn't communication. In fact, it's still fundamental. But we're using the same mechanisms we designed for when execution was the slow part. And now that execution is the fast part, staying aligned becomes harder. When the pace of work accelerates, even the smallest deviation gets amplified. What used to get corrected in a month now breaks in three days. Teams need to align more often, but have less time to do it.
On top of that, there's another less visible layer: the emotional and political cost of coordinating. It's not just about making good decisions-it's about showing they were well thought out. A feature might be ready in two hours, but first you'll spend three days building the case, presenting it in leadership meetings, waiting for feedback, adjusting the scope so nobody feels they were bypassed. All of that is work too.
A one-hour meeting to decide whether it's worth doing something you could test in half an hour starts to look odd. Not because talking is bad, but because the ratio between the cost of talking and the cost of doing has shifted dramatically.
And that changes everything.
In many teams, what starts to create friction isn't technical capacity or lack of ideas-it's the number of interfaces you have to pass through to move anything forward. Every handoff adds context that gets lost, interpretations that shift, approvals that pile up. The more touchpoints, the more latency. And the longer a decision takes to form, the less advantage there is in having sped up execution.
That's why you're seeing more and more roles that used to seem like odd hybrids: product people getting involved in implementation, technical profiles with design and business judgment, leads who don't separate technical decisions from product decisions. It's not about doing everything-it's about reducing the distance between understanding and executing. Getting decisions closer to where things are actually built.
A generalist profile gains relevance for a simple reason: they carry more useful context and need less translation. They understand how the pieces fit together, anticipate impact, unblock without waiting. And with AI as support, they can go deep on demand and move with more autonomy without breaking the system.
The competitive advantage is shifting from speed of execution to speed of decision-making with enough context. It's not the one who produces the most who wins, but the one who decides well with less friction. Lowering the cost of coordination without losing quality becomes a problem of organizational design, not individual effort.
In that world, the teams that go the farthest aren't the ones with the most hands or the most processes-they're the ones that move as if they were a single mind. Small, multidisciplinary teams with a culture strong enough to share language, judgment, and code without needing to align every fifteen minutes. Not because they don't talk, but because they think alike. Because they understand each other without much preamble. Because trust is already built. (Hire friends).
When execution is no longer the bottleneck, synchronization becomes the real differentiator.