Sanja Grbic from Automattic shares her experience in Radical Speed Month, where AI tools and autonomy empowered small teams to rapidly build and ship projects, transforming traditional workflows and enabling cross-functional collaboration. She highlights that beyond technology, the initiative’s success stemmed from cultural shifts that encouraged experimentation, upskilling, and employee agency, unlocking new levels of speed and innovation within a large distributed company.
Sanja Grbic from Automattic shares her experience participating in a unique company initiative called Radical Speed Month, where two-person teams were given full autonomy to build and ship projects within 30 days. Automattic, known for products like WordPress.com, Jetpack, and WooCommerce, is a fully distributed and asynchronous company with around 1,400 employees. Sanja, a product designer with over a decade of experience, highlights how AI tools and company-wide AI enablement programs played a crucial role in empowering employees to experiment and accelerate their workflows during this initiative.
The first project Sanja worked on was a collaborative effort during an in-person AI enablement course, where a small team built a board game session manager app in just two hours. This experience was less about the product itself and more about the collaborative learning process, especially for non-engineers like Sanja who gained hands-on experience with coding, version control, and teamwork. A key insight was the importance of engineers acting as enablers and teachers to help others upskill, particularly as AI tools allow people to cross traditional role boundaries.
Sanja’s second project was a more complex design system status tracker aimed at surfacing up-to-date design system information for both humans and AI tools. Working mostly independently, she built a fully functional proof of concept in about two and a half weeks, moving from designer to design engineer. This project demonstrated how AI and autonomy allowed her to own the entire process, from ideation to deployment, bypassing typical organizational hurdles and enabling rapid iteration and delivery within a large, established system.
The third project involved pairing with another designer to build an iOS chat app for WooCommerce merchants that integrated AI to answer customer questions in real time. Completed in just six days, this project showcased a significant shift in Sanja’s design process, moving from traditional high-fidelity prototyping in Figma to building functional prototypes first and refining visuals later. The use of cloud code and collaborative tools accelerated the workflow and improved alignment, illustrating how AI and new processes can transform product development speed and collaboration.
Overall, Sanja emphasizes that the success of Radical Speed Month was not just about the tools but about changing human behavior and organizational culture. She encourages large organizations to provide access to AI tools, identify enablers and champions, create space for experimentation, and grant agency to employees. This approach can help teams break out of old habits and unlock the speed and innovation potential that AI tools offer, ultimately transforming roles and workflows across the company.