The AMP team is small and agile, bypassing traditional processes like code reviews to ship 15 times a day. They leverage Sourcegraph's customer trust, revenue, and platform teams (e.g., security), allowing the core team to focus purely on product velocity and radical innovation.
Instead of trying to convert skeptics, AMP focuses exclusively on users already at the frontier of AI adoption. They believe that building for someone who doesn't know how to prompt well forces them to build simplistic features and fall behind the pace of innovation.
Resist hiring quickly after finding traction. Instead, 'hire painfully slowly' and assemble an initial 'MVP Crew' — a small, self-sufficient team with all skills needed to build, market, and sell the product end-to-end. This establishes a core DNA of speed and execution before scaling.
Gumroad's CEO credits their rapid development to his role as a solo decision-maker. This structure eliminates the lengthy processes of gaining internal buy-in and creating extensive documentation (PRDs, specs) common in larger organizations, which are often more about alignment than execution.
The V0 team operates with minimal product management oversight, empowering product-minded engineers (often ex-founders) to make 95% of product decisions directly. This sacrifices potentially "perfect" choices for a dramatic increase in development velocity.
Contradicting the common startup goal of scaling headcount, the founders now actively question how small they can keep their team. They see a direct link between adding people, increasing process, and slowing down, leveraging a small, elite team as a core part of their high-velocity strategy.
In an AI-driven world, product teams should operate like a busy shipyard: seemingly chaotic but underpinned by high skill and careful communication. This cross-functional pod (PM, Eng, Design, Research, Data, Marketing) collaborates constantly, breaking down traditional processes like standups.
The team avoids traditional design reviews and handoffs, fostering a "process-allergic" culture where everyone obsessively builds and iterates directly on the product. This chaotic but passionate approach is key to their speed and quality, allowing them to move fast, make mistakes, and fix them quickly.
To avoid disrupting existing enterprise customers and being disrupted themselves, Sourcegraph launched a new brand, AMP. This freed them from Kodi's contracts, customer expectations, and release cycles, enabling a much faster, more radical development pace for their new coding agent.
To launch new products and compete with agile startups, embed a small "incubation seller" team directly within the technology organization. This model ensures tight alignment between product, engineering, and the first revenue-generating efforts, mirroring the cross-functional approach of an early-stage company.
The AMP team believes that accommodating popular user requests like model choice or 'bring your own key' would slow their ability to innovate. They argue that their target users ultimately prefer a superior, opinionated product over peripheral features, even if they ask for them.