The Velocity Lab

Pick One Project. Crush It.

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Episode Summary

Dave and Dan announce a reshaping of their AI adoption work: org-wide SDLC transformation over three months wasn't moving the needle, so they're switching to embedding in a single team — even a single repo — and unleashing agents on a big, important project. The episode doubles as free advice to engineering leaders: stop doing AI at 20%, pick one project, and crush it.

Key Topics

  • Why the org-wide "evaluate your whole SDLC" model under-delivered in three months
  • The new model: embed in one team, one project, one repo — and ship a big migration/rewrite fast
  • Coding is becoming the dinosaur skill; planning, reviewing, and sanity-checking keep humans in the loop
  • Why staff/principal engineers map most naturally onto the agent-orchestration role
  • The leader's playbook: cut the roadmap, take a handful of your best people, focus for one quarter
  • Build the system while you ship — then force the rest of the org to adopt it
  • Why five-person companies disrupt giants, and why that's even more true with AI

    • Notable Quotes

    • "If you're just writing code and then waiting for somebody else to review your stuff, and then you deploy it — that's going away. That's solved by AI agents already."
    • "Take a handful of your best people, only focus on this, and by the end of three months you're gonna be like, 'Holy cow.'"
    • "You're building a system. That system will work for any other project you have."

      • About The Velocity Lab

      Dave O'Dell and Dan McAulay work inside engineering organizations every day helping them ship faster with AI. No hype, no BS — just what's working in the field.

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      The Velocity LabBy Dave O'Dell and Dan McAulay