Her team went from ten blog posts a quarter to sixty. Not a single one outperformed the original ten.
Her fix started in the middle. She found what she calls "like-minded lunatics," people already in pain from existing systems, and built a coalition over seven months. Sales teams joined unexpectedly, recognizing the same dysfunction from their side. The mandate: make the team "structurally smaller and dramatically more capable."
Meanwhile, a BuildBetter survey surfaced a number that stopped me: 84% of product leaders claim AI is integrated across their lifecycle. Only 18% of the managers who do the work agree. A 4.7x perception gap between the people who approve the dashboards and the people who live inside the workflows.
The machine looks different from the top than it does from the middle.
DeVincenzo still uses AI for research, ideation, and structural work, but humans keep control of editorial judgment. Her line: "Taste cannot be automated."
I keep hearing the same confession from marketing leaders. They built the machine. Now they can't stop feeding it. This week's Foraging digs into two practitioners who stopped.
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