I’m building something entirely new. No roadmap, no guardrails, no “this is how it’s usually done” to fall back on.

This month, as I’ve been working with several new teams, the concepts of learning and accelerating understanding have been at the forefront of my mind—particularly how AI fits into everyone’s learning toolkit. As a seasoned technical leader who’s witnessed multiple paradigm shifts over the past 30 years, I’ve noticed a curious paradox emerging: as AI tools make information more accessible than ever, deep understanding becomes increasingly valuable.

The past ten years or so, be it in an official capacity or consulting, I’ve worked with various organizations to coach and lead high-performing teams. While I’ve spent most of my career in the technical space, I’ve had the privilege and honor to work with and help lead some amazing digital product teams the past three years.

Over the past several years, my career and learning path has dove deeper into leadership strategy and product marketing. As with many organizations, the excitement of machine learning, AI, and rapid prototyping has found a home in our team as we research, learn, test… and then either succeed or fail… then start all over again! I recently had a chance to sit down with product team leads from a few different organizations and talk about ideas, trends, and how teams were keeping up.

This little discussion was initially prompted by an old Information Week’s article of “Stay Ahead With Soft Skills” aimed at computer programmers and “techies”; however, while project management and such are great skills—especially in agile development–the most important skill is communication.