Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Welcome to Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge with Dave Anderson, Mark McCann and Mike O'Reilly. We want to share our tools and techniques so that you can use them to communicate your Technical Strategy with your C-Suite and business owners. We want to help you to build a serverless first organisation. We will show you how to use Wardley Mapping to gain situational awareness of where your cloud applications and business are. And then how to develop your technical capability in away that builds engineering standards to set your organisation up for sustainable success.Sounds like the tools and techniques that you need - then hit the subscribe!-ABOUT- Dave, Mark and Mike are senior technical architects/leaders passionate about driving technical strategy. They have led transformation journeys, technical excellence, cloud adoption and tech strategies in many industries.Active in various technologies including ML/AI, Public Cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), Engineering, Product, Cyber and UX.
Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Serverless CrAIc Ep82 AI Is Changing Software Engineering — Why Your North Star Matters
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AI is dramatically increasing the speed at which teams can build software. But if you can ship features in hours instead of months, a new problem emerges:
How do you know you’re building the right thing?
In this episode of Serverless CrAIc, Dave Anderson, Mark McCann, and Michael O’Reilly explore why clarity of purpose and a strong North Star are more important than ever in an AI-accelerated world.
As AI tools and agentic systems remove friction from development, teams can prototype, build, and deploy faster than ever before. But without clear direction, that speed can quickly turn into chaos, feature overload, and wasted effort.
We discuss:
Why the North Star framework still matters in the AI era
The importance of leading vs lagging metrics
How observability and telemetry support decision-making
Why product management and engineering roles are shifting
The growing need for product-oriented engineering teams
If AI increases your delivery velocity, your strategy and decision-making must evolve just as quickly.
Chapters
00:00 – Welcome to Serverless Craic
AI everywhere and the coming singularity (maybe).
00:31 – Does the North Star still matter in the AI era?
Why clarity of purpose becomes even more critical when you can build faster.
01:30 – Why speed without direction is dangerous
How AI can lead teams to build the wrong things faster.
02:20 – Experience as an advantage in the AI era
Why experienced engineers ask better questions of AI systems.
03:06 – The first North Star question: What game are you playing?
Defining your problem space before building anything.
04:29 – Rapid experimentation with AI prototypes
Using AI-driven prototyping to discover meaningful product signals.
05:41 – Observability hasn’t changed
Why understanding what to measure is still the hardest problem.
06:32 – Leading vs lagging metrics
How telemetry and instrumentation help teams track progress.
07:53 – The shift toward systems thinking
Why engineers increasingly need a systems engineering mindset.
08:29 – Product management pressure in the AI era
The growing importance of solving real customer problems.
09:27 – Wardley mapping, user needs, and rapid iteration
Why product strategy becomes more important as teams move faster.
10:38 – The danger of overwhelming users with features
Understanding organisational and user adoption limits.
11:01 – Decision-making speed in large organisations
Why strategic decisions must flow faster through organisations.
11:55 – Engineering teams becoming product teams
Autonomy and product ownership in high-velocity environments.
12:48 – Making good decisions against the North Star
Why strong leadership and judgement still matter.
Resources & References
North Star Framework – aligning teams around a single product metric
Leading vs Lagging Metrics – measuring immediate vs long-term outcomes
Observability in modern systems – instrumentation and telemetry
The Build Trap (concept discussed by product leadership thinkers)
Wardley Mapping – understanding user needs and strategic positioning
DORA Metrics – measuring engineering delivery performance
Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
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