01
The distribution is not new
Pareto applies to engineering output the way it applies to sales pipelines and bug reports. Capers Jones has been measuring this since the early eighties. DORA tells the same story from a different angle.
Slide 01
Pareto applied to engineering output before AI. AI did not change the distribution. It widened it. The org chart you currently run is the residue of avoiding that math for a decade. AI just turned the lights on in a room you have been navigating in the dark since at least 2015.
Slide 02
Every honest engineering manager you have ever met has rank-ordered their team in their head and could name, right now, the four people they would not survive losing.
The list is not new. The org built around the list is.
Pareto applies to engineering output the way it applies to sales pipelines and bug reports. Capers Jones has been measuring this since the early eighties. DORA tells the same story from a different angle.
Now visible in commit history, in cycle time, in the Slack channel where the same four names answer every hard question. AI did not change the distribution. It widened it.
Architecture decisions. Cross-system migrations. Ambiguous requirements that need judgment. Your top 20% with frontier model access ships 5–10x what your bottom 20% ships on that slice.
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Slide 04
The relay was Matt S., Dan, me, and Ben C. Four of us. Three handoffs. Three sets of fresh legs. Matt B. could beat the four of us alone, on a single set of legs and lungs.
The relay lost regularly. The handoffs were the entire problem.
Drill the relay — handoff drills, baton work, conditioning the second leg, mental work for the anchor — and try to claw four of us into a finals spot. Or invest the season in Matt B.
Race film. Recovery protocols. Race-week tapering. Individual-event strategy. He did not solve the relay's handoff problem by putting Matt B. on the relay. He held him out of the team event entirely.
The relay finished where it always finished. Matt B. won the 100, the 200, and the 400. The team won points at conference and regionals. The coach also has the trophy.
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Slide 06
Strategic bets. New market entries. Platform rewrites your CEO has staked the year on. Put the fast people here. These are the races that change the company's quarter if shipped.
Mature platforms generating revenue. Maintenance work. Compliance and reliability. Internal tools doing their job. They do not need a Matt B. They need a team that ships small, ships safely, stays on call, and does not break what customers already pay for.
In decline. Need to be carried responsibly until end-of-life. Different metric. Different staffing. Do not burn senior engineers on these by default.
The strategic bets ship slowly. The mature products burn out the senior engineers who get pulled onto them every time something breaks. Match the runner to the race. Match the team to the product. Match the budget to the team.
Slide 07
Spread $500K across all fifty engineers. Bottom 20% improves a little, mostly on parts that were not the constraint. Middle 60% improves a bit. Top 20% improves modestly because you rate-limited the people who would have used twice the budget. ~25–30% activity gain. Not the same as outcome gain.
Frontier model access, no rate limits. Largest context window money buys. Removed ceremonies. Direct executive air cover. The money is the smaller half. The bigger half is the assignment and the permission to ship without queueing for seven approvals.
Your CFO will say option two is risky — it concentrates value creation in ten people. The right answer is to price retention into the budget. Top-quartile comp. Equity refresh. Net it. Option two still wins by a wide margin. The line item belongs in the model.
Their output on the work that drives revenue moves into a different range, somewhere between two and four times what they shipped last quarter, because the constraint was never their skill. It was the system around them and the assignments they were not allowed to take.
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Slide 09
Specific outcomes shipped. Scope of ownership demonstrated. Mentor signoff. The criteria are not a vibe. The path from operating org into distance unit is on the wall.
Distance engineers do twelve-month tours, then rotate back into the operating org for at least a quarter. Keeps the unit from ossifying. Pushes distance-grade habits back into the platform.
A clear door is the difference between a healthy two-org structure and a permanent two-tier system that your CHRO is correct to refuse. The board sees a system, not a caste. The workforce sees a path.
Comp bands raised across the operating org as part of the formalization, not just in the distance unit. Reliability work is what makes feature work bettable. Pay it that way.
Slide 10
"We have decided to stop pretending that one engineering org structure works for both kinds of work we do. The work splits cleanly. We are going to staff it that way. We are funding two AI investments, not one, on two different theses. The distance unit is being formalized. The operating org is being funded at parity per head against a different metric set, because what you do is not less valuable, it is differently valuable, and we have under-invested in the tooling that makes your work compound. There is a published door between the two orgs in both directions. Comp bands are being adjusted up across the operating org as part of this, not just in the distance unit, because reliability work is what makes feature work bettable. If you have questions, your manager has them, your skip-level has them, I have them. We are not doing this in the dark."
If you are not willing to make that commitment, do not run the play.
They show up. They mentor the juniors. They are the ones who answer Slack at eleven at night when production is on fire and the distance unit is asleep.
The race changed. The roster did not, and it will not in time for this quarter. That is not a judgment on those engineers. It is a judgment on the org you built and the clock you are running against.
Not this quarter. Maybe not this fiscal year. With a published door, real ownership, and clarity about where they are running to, the people you have are mostly the people you need.
Slide 11
Not seniority. Not performance review score. Outcomes shipped in the last twelve months. Acknowledge the EM cost of pulling them off seven squads. Pre-negotiate the roadmap impact. Do not announce the pilot until the cost is on the table.
Hand them the three most valuable problems on your roadmap. No standups. No sprint planning. A weekly thirty-minute readout to the CTO instead of two layers of middle management.
Not story points. Not PR count. A short list, agreed in writing with CFO and head of product on day zero: revenue-attributed features merged and accepted, P0 incident cycle-time reductions held for thirty days, migration milestones hit and operable by the platform team.
Measure against the same ten engineers' baseline from the prior sixty days, and against the rest of the org's same sixty days. Construct a small honest control cohort if you can. Selection effects, novelty effects, and Hawthorne effects are real. Acknowledge them. The point is decision-grade signal in this fiscal year.
Slide 12
That is the right answer in every business case I have run. It is also the answer most boards will not write the check for in this fiscal year. If you can fund all of it, do it. If you cannot, the choice is yours and it cannot be delegated.
The CFO will tell you what is affordable. The CHRO will tell you what is comfortable. The board will tell you what is impressive in a deck. None of those is the decision. The decision is what your company will be in 2027.
Slide 13
The coach picked the race he could win, picked the athlete who could win it, funded the rest of the team enough to keep them in the program, and built the season around that math. The relay team felt slighted. The trophy is still in the case.