#8 Why AI won't save us from shitty work culture

What product leaders need to double-down on when building great teams

My friend Kim’s LinkedIn post hit me like a shovel: dumping money on AI won’t fix our real productivity killers — messy, human problems that no bot can solve.

The gist of her argument is this: business leaders who spend huge sums of money on AI tooling in order to make their teams more productive are missing the point. Productivity in organisations is impacted the most by social factors such as friction in collaboration, unhealthy conflict, untrained managers, and excessive meetings.

It’s a case of ‘new and shiny’ solutions winning out over ‘messy and hard’ problems.

So whilst AI may eventually completely replace humans in many jobs, we’re not there yet. We still have to learn how to work together to get things done. And it’s always going to be a requirement to get along with other people.

Unless we replace all our teams with AI agents, we will have humans interacting with humans at some point in the business. And each human is a messy and wonderful complex arrangement of beliefs, sensations, emotions, thoughts, experiences, stories, and biases.

When people get together, these all combine in a swirling mixture that emerges as culture.

In my experience, Product people are at the ‘sharp end’ of dysfunctional cultures — we see the effects of a lack of vision, indecisive strategy, team silos, and poor communication play out across the business. This is because, unlike other functions that sit in their verticals, Product cuts cross functionally (i.e. horizontally) to other team orientations.

We have to work across teams in order to achieve product success.

Otherwise we get:

• Unloved roadmaps: We roll out Q2’s plan, only to watch stakeholders shrug—or worse, openly challenge every initiative at the kick-off.

• Feature gauntlets: Our inboxes overflow with ‘urgent’ customer demands, each from the squeakiest wheel, and we end up chasing the loudest voices, not the biggest opportunities.

• MVP face-plants: We launch an experiment that by every metric ‘worked,’ but execution hiccups—from misaligned hand-offs to half-baked user flows—bury any chance of real insights.

This chaos not only depletes our team’s morale, but also delays launches, dilutes product-market fit and ultimately dents growth.

And we’re right in the thick of it so we see the dysfunction first-hand, unlike senior leaders who may only see symptoms of it, or hear about it when it bubbles up from their teams.

Those messy human dynamics appear in Product just how Patrick Lanconi defined them in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team:

1. Absence of trust: you’re working on a product strategy by yourself, and don’t show it to anybody on your team until it’s in a polished slide deck

2. Fear of conflict: in a meeting with a demanding stakeholder you concede to all of their requests, knowing it’s going to impact your team’s ability to deliver on a strategic initiative.

3. Lack of commitment: you share the product vision and strategy, and it looks like your team gets it, but three months later you find out they’re still building something you deprioritised.

4. Avoidance of accountability: a new product was shipped that broke production for the whole platform; it was your decision but you don’t speak up in the post mortem.

5. Inattention to team results: the team celebrates closing the deal on two major partners, but six months’ later there’s still no revenue coming in, and nobody seems that bothered about finding out why.

(And hey — I’m not blaming anybody here, because I have learned the hard way by making many of these mistakes over the course of my career!)

None of these problems are solved by implementing AI — so if that won’t fix it, what will?

Building real relationships.

This takes having not just one, but many conversations with someone to get to know them, what makes them tick, what they like and what they fear. It takes time — it can’t be rushed or ‘hacked’ or meaningfully replaced by AI.

Unless we are subbing in AI for human beings in every job we do currently, there is no avoiding human to human connection. Yes the conversations may sometimes be hard, or cringey, or awkward, but it’s also so very necessary.

Let’s not forget that.

What’s one ‘messy, human’ conversation you’ll schedule this week?

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If you’re struggling to build relationships with or between your team, I can help:

• Work with me 1:1 to become a confident communicator, ready to handle any conflict or negotiation.

• Invite me to your event or podcast to share more on building great work cultures in the age of AI.