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Podcast

What Happens After Coding Is Solved? | Fiona Fung

Career | Growth

Source ↗ ← All highlights
  • Have AI Run Your Monthly Product Retrospectives
    • Use AI as a manager to run regular retrospectives: Fiona runs Cloud Code remote sessions that view repos, Slack feedback, and metrics to review shipped work.
    • She shares the routine live with engineers to discuss impact, bugs, and next investments rather than only counting commits. (Time 0:10:03)
  • Automate Morning Feedback With Routines
    • Automate your daily monitoring with routines: Fiona uses routines to summarize feedback channels, surface themes, and even produce PRs to review each morning.
    • Routines spawn agents that continuously scan Slack, emails, and metrics so managers wake to actionable items. (Time 0:13:08)
  • Shift From Writing Code To Verifying Expectations
    • Verification became the critical problem as throughput rose: automated checks and explicit ‘what good looks like’ frameworks let Claude validate PRs at scale.
    • Fiona recommends checking specs into repos and keeping them updated so models can enforce the intended behavior. (Time 0:14:55)
  • Hire Product Builders And Deep Systems Experts
    • Hire two complementary profiles: prioritize creative product-minded builders plus a smaller set of deep systems experts for trust-critical areas.
    • Fiona expanded Cloud Code with systems hires when they lacked distributed-systems expertise for sensitive components. (Time 0:17:18)
  • Ambition Becomes The New Constraint
    • Ambition replaced engineering constraints: with AI doing much of implementation, engineers’ upper bound is now how big they can think.
    • Fiona shares an example of a non-mobile engineer shipping mobile features by partnering with Claude. (Time 0:18:30)
  • Lean In With A Growth Mindset
    • Cultivate a growth mindset and lean into curiosity: Fiona tells those afraid of AI to ask what’s within their control and take actions to learn the tools.
    • She suggests doing one risky learning move to force growth and avoid stagnation. (Time 0:20:04)
  • Dogfooding Led To Cowork For Small Business
    • Fiona dogfooded Cowork while expense-traveling and onboarded small-business friends, which revealed unique use cases and bugs.
    • A restaurant owner used Cowork to index menus and run market price comparisons, inspiring the Small Business product bundle. (Time 0:27:52)
  • Build For Latent Demand You Observe In The Wild
    • Spotting latent demand matters: Fiona watches unexpected behaviors (non-coders using Cloud Code) and builds tailored experiences (Small Business toggle) to convert friction into product features.
    • Rapid feedback and internal usage accelerated these discoveries. (Time 0:32:43)
  • The Next Frontier Is Asynchronous Agent Fleets
    • Work is moving toward asynchronous agent orchestration: routines spawn agents to run checks and produce artifacts asynchronously, raising the abstraction above single prompts.
    • Fiona predicts fleets of agents and JIT routines will change day-to-day engineering workflows. (Time 0:35:36)
  • Measure Outcome Over Token Or Code Counts
    • Measure outcomes not raw AI activity: Fiona warns against token-maxing or lines-of-code metrics and urges focusing on whether output delivers the desired product outcome.
    • She recommends listening tours across senior and junior engineers to capture qualitative value from AI tooling adoption. (Time 0:40:28)
  • Classify Issues As Bad Or Sad To Prioritize Quality
    • Define proactive quality thresholds and triage them: Fiona introduced ‘bad versus sad’ where bad is irrecoverable (crashes) and sad is recoverable pain points (flicker), letting teams prioritize fixes.
    • Each team declares its bad/sad definitions for their surface area (e.g., CLI crash rates = bad). (Time 0:44:47)
  • Make Managers Ship Code Part Time
    • Require managers to spend maker time as ICs: Fiona asks new managers to start as ICs or continue coding part-time so they stay connected to the codebase and product.
    • This practice builds rapport, helps leaders dogfood the product, and prevents losing touch with technical realities. (Time 0:49:57)
  • Combat Agent-Induced Isolation With Pair Programming
    • Agents can make individual work lonely; deliberate social structures matter: Cloud Code started pairwise programming lunches and hackathons to recreate collaborative learning.
    • Watching peers use tools revealed diverse flows and transmitted tacit knowledge faster than docs. (Time 0:55:38)
  • Automate Reviews Up To The Trust Boundary
    • Build automated verification but keep experts where trust matters: push automated reviews where specs and framework checks suffice, and reserve human reviews for deep subject-matter areas.
    • Continuously ask if expert knowledge can be encoded and automated to scale confidence. (Time 1:09:15)
  • Agent Fleets Create A New Context Switching Problem
    • Context switching rises with many agents and async routines, creating a new flow problem: Fiona blocks focus time to catch up on agent work she spawned and notes this is unsolved.
    • She flags context-switch load as an open challenge as routines proliferate. (Time 1:11:11)
  • Rethink How We Train The Next Generation Of Engineers
    • Education and onboarding must evolve: Fiona wonders whether apprenticeships or fellowship-style programs will replace traditional paths to teach the ‘double click’ systems knowledge future builders need.
    • She worries about how to compress deep systems understanding when many never read raw code anymore. (Time 1:13:24)
  • Treat Culture As A Living System To Guard
    • Protect and cultivate culture intentionally as you scale: Fiona says culture is living fiber that shifts as teams grow and prioritizes diverse perspectives and open debates.
    • She pushes managers to surface issues early and avoid the ‘everything’s fine’ trap so problems get solved collaboratively. (Time 1:18:06)
  • Remove Or Automate One Outdated Process
    • Kill processes that no longer serve you: pick one manual, noisy, or expensive process and ask if it still has purpose, then stop or automate it.
    • Fiona changed six-month planning to lightweight monthly JIT planning and now considers automating the process to avoid tax-like upkeep. (Time 1:23:03)
  • Switch To Monthly Just In Time Planning
    • Use Just-In-Time planning with monthly priorities: Fiona runs monthly lightweight planning sheets and weekly checks rather than six-month roadmaps to stay nimble.
    • She keeps themes for longer horizons but updates execution monthly because the landscape changes fast. (Time 1:24:36)
  • Knitting Keeps Fiona Grounded And Creative
    • Fiona learned knitting from her grandmother at eight and knits during calls; she likens knitting’s stitch patterns to binary logic.
    • She dreams of opening a yarn store in her grandmother’s name to recreate the community she loved. (Time 1:35:18)