What Elite Engineering Teams Do Differently in the Age of AI

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Intro

Throughout this year, I had the pleasure of talking with many different people and teams about how everyone works and what makes them successful.

I’ve visited many companies in San Francisco and had countless conversations with engineers and engineering leaders from companies around the world.

In today’s article, I am sharing insights, particularly about what differentiates elite engineering teams from the average ones.

The insights shared in this article are from:

• Sulman Choudhry, Head of Engineering, ChatGPT, OpenAI
• Venkat Venkataramani, VP of Applied Infrastructure, OpenAI
• Katelyn Lesse, Head of Platform Engineering at Anthropic
• Jefferson Frazer, Director, AI Metadata and Delivery, Shutterstock
• Andrew Churchill, CTO, Weave

The question I asked them was: “What separates elite engineering teams from the average ones?” Their answers are shared in this article.

This is an article for paid subscribers, and here is the full index:

- Elite engineering teams focus on the “outer loop”
- Clarity on the north star and good metrics in place in order to measure success
🔒 At Anthropic, elite teams are more ambitious than average teams
🔒 Team tenure and committed work say a lot about how great the team is
🔒 Elite teams work within flatter orgs and have a good ratio of spending and delivering values
🔒 Last words

Let’s start!

Elite engineering teams focus on the “outer loop”

Sulman Choudhry, Head of Engineering, ChatGPT, OpenAI, described the difference between an average team and an elite team using the idea of the inner loop and the outer loop of software development.

The inner loop refers to shipping or writing code faster. But the problematic part is that more code is not always better. Many average teams are already good at this, they build quickly and produce a lot of code.

However, the real difference appears in the outer loop.

The outer loop is about getting real user feedback, learning from it, and quickly iterating to improve the product. Average teams often run into bottlenecks here.

Elite teams optimize both loops. They not only write code quickly but also build systems that help them test ideas, gather user signals, and iterate faster toward real outcomes.

And the example Sulman has shared:

Instead of writing code and manually testing it, elite teams use tools like Codex to test and iterate as part of the development workflow. This helps them get to the desired result much faster.The ultimate version of the outer loop connects development directly to real user outcomes, such as product usage or user engagement.

So, to sum up the insights shared from Sulman:

• Average teams mainly optimize the inner loop, focusing on writing/generating code faster.
• Elite teams optimize the outer loop, learning faster and driving real impact.

What matters most is impact, not the amount of code written.

Clarity on the north star and good metrics in place in order to measure success

Venkat Venkataramani, VP of Applied Infrastructure, OpenAI, mentioned that for a shorter time period of the work of specific teams, it’s easier to see whether the team is doing well or not, because there are clear deliverables and well-defined metrics attached to it. It’s a lot harder to know if the project takes a long time to finish.

This is an important signal for infrastructure teams to break down projects into smaller, more manageable pieces, because that’s how you can show your progress a lot more clearly.

And the 2 specific high-signals of elite teams Venkat shared are:

• Does the team have clarity on what the north star looks like? (long-term goal of the team) And are they able to hit that goal as well?
• Another signal is if the team doesn’t have specific metrics in place that they track in order to know how well they are doing.

And then he also shared the following:

For every infra team, there’s always a time when there needs to be some “hill climbing”, which means that the team may be overwhelmed with the amount of work in a certain period of time because of how unpredictable infrastructure work can be.Great teams are able to balance that short-term pressure well, without losing sight of the long-term goals.Which means that they don’t just put “all hands on deck” when there is a certain pressure, but they stay composed, assign specific people to focus on the right areas, communicate clearly if there’s going to be any timeline changes on projects, and manage to juggle everything without dropping the ball.

At Anthropic, elite teams are more ambitious than average teams