Summary
Sanja Grbic, a product designer at Automattic — the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and Tumblr — recounts her experience in the company’s ‘Radical Speed Month,’ a 30-day initiative where roughly 500 employees formed two-person teams and shipped real projects while pausing normal roadmap work. The experiment produced around 794 projects across a fully distributed, 1,400-person organization, offering an unusually large-scale window into how AI tools change team dynamics and individual capability.
Grbic, who had limited coding experience before the initiative, built three separate projects during the month, including a game room booking app with a 16-bit office map UI and a design system status tracker for Automattic’s open-source WordPress design system. Tools central to her workflow included Claude Code and Context.ac, an MCP server that gives AI tools access to decades of Automattic’s internally documented knowledge.
The talk goes beyond individual productivity gains to examine organizational implications. Grbic argues that when AI lowers the barrier to contributing code, the highest-leverage move for skilled engineers is enabling others — not writing more code themselves. She also addresses the different challenges AI coding tools face in greenfield projects versus large, decade-old product ecosystems, making the case that organizational context and enablement infrastructure shape outcomes as much as the tools themselves.
📺 Source: AI Engineer · Published July 07, 2026
🏷️ Format: Workflow Case Study
