The Symphony Of Product Development

Welcome to this installment of Veo, where every week, I share a bit about what myself and others are seeing on the cutting edge of software product development.

In this issue…

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-John Cox

People are always surprised to learn where the name for SevenPico came from.

It’s inspired by an old British army adage called The Seven P’s: “Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance”

Seven P Co. 

SevenPico.

Get it?

There’s also some Greek and Latin influence hidden in there – as there is throughout this newsletter – but suffice it to say that superb planning has always been a point of personal pride (there’s three more P’s).

So today, I want to talk about one of the biggest changes I’ve seen in project planning as we’ve refined our Virtual Engineering Org.

In a word: Parallelism

In a typical human sprint, the main goal is obviously to maximize the productivity of all existing engineers.

This can be kind of a nightmare. 

If Bob needs to finish feature A before Lisa can start feature B, Lisa either sits idle (expensive) or context-switches to work on something else, paying a price in lost focus, split attention, and communication overhead as she juggles projects for different teams.

Not to mention juggling skillsets, time-off, etc (but more on this in a future email)...

You as the leader are often not able to structure sprints around the ideal order of operations. Instead, the best you can do is manage constraints, and try to keep people busy while (hopefully) minimizing chaos.

But VEO is different.

For starters, if an agent isn’t required, it’s simply turned off.

When more muscle is needed, you spin up more agents – all with the exact same context on the project, so there is no communication burden or cognitive switching cost among them.

The biggest implication of all this: You now plan your “manpower” around the ideal ticket order, rather than the other way around.

It’s a fundamentally different way of working, and I find myself thinking of sprints almost like a symphony now.

We open with one or two blocker tasks – the violin prelude, echoing in the dark. As the blocks are removed, more and more agents join in, pulling tickets, coding, reviewing, and revising all in parallel.

The throughput of those agents is ~8x that of a human engineer, and so far, our testing has shown that a single operator can easily manage two agents (so 16x throughput), and at times, as many as four.

You still need stellar technologists. They’re just spending their time differently.

As that number continues to rise (and we are actively working to get it to one hundred), product people will need to adopt new project planning frameworks and industry best-practices.

Perhaps a new adage: “Proper Planning and Parallel Processing Prevents Project Paralysis”

But that really is enough P’s for one day.

Here are a few things that I’ve found interesting this week. Maybe you’ll find them interesting as well!

1. Anthropic introduces Cowork, ClaudeCode for non-coding work tasks. I make no bones about the fact that I am a big big fan of Anthropic and I love seeing what they come up with to make my life and work more productive.

2. Live vividly with your superpowers, from Katy Ward. Reframing your skills and abilities is not only appealing to me personally, but an idea we are applying to SevenPico.

3. If you live in or are visiting Austin check out Loudmouth Pizza. Very cool building and atmosphere, and I can personally vouch for the Hot Boy Summer pizza and the pillowy soft focaccia. I also hear the Italian sandwich is pretty tasty - for my next visit!