Compound Leverage
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My phone rang Saturday morning.
A friend shared how his government software development team was cut from 20 to 7 people.
They were behind on projects, and their junior developer couldn't handle everything alone.
"I'm curious if you can help me figure out how ChatGPT and Gemini can assist. I'm not getting what I want out of either tool."
I asked him three questions:
"Where do you want to be in 12 months? What's right in front of you this week?"
"Tell me everything you need: security testing, front-end, back-end, all of it."
"If you hired 13 contractors, what are their job titles, and what would they work on? What access do they need?”
That's exactly what we built, but with AI tools instead of contractors.
A week later: "I did what you told me. We delivered everything in less than an hour. My boss reviewed what we delivered, and we pushed to pre-production.
I'm surprised at how changing my approach to using AI tools allowed us to accomplish so much. I followed your THINK process and the resources you shared—it was easy to implement."
This experience revealed something crucial: most software is built for human users, not digital employees. It expects humans to figure everything out on their own.
So I started rebuilding an app I am working on with Sarah, a digital employee who finds proposals to bid on while you sleep, finds opportunities, and briefs you every morning.
This isn't about better prompts. It's about building software that thinks like a team member, not a tool.
Here's my challenge: whenever you hit a bottleneck, ask yourself:
Where do I want to be in 12 months, and how can AI assist me in getting there?
Who's my Sarah?
What would Sarah's team look like?
This shifts how you work with AI tools and the results you get.
The future isn't human inputs generating computer outputs. It's human and digital employee collaboration.
Who's your Sarah? So, whenever you encounter a bottleneck, I challenge you to ask:
Where do I want to be 12 months from now, and how can AI tools help me achieve that goal? Then ask: Who's my Sarah?
Then you can start thinking about Sarah's team members, and so on. If you approach everything with a digital employee mindset, it changes how you work with AI tools and the results you can achieve with them.
No matter what happens, new models, tools, and capabilities, your work is built around collaboration to maximize opportunities.
Marvin