You have 1 article left to read this month before you need to register a free LeadDev.com account.
Key takeaways:
- AI-driven parallel work is eroding what makes a team: shared goals,** interdependent work**, and** stability**, leaving engineers shipping more while feeling more isolated. Culture forms through everyday collaboration. When AI replaces peer problem-solving, teams lose the shared experiences that reinforce norms.** Staff+ engineers must deliberately rebuild**what once happened automatically: celebrating good behavior, writing charters, and modeling collaboration.
A year or two ago, the engineering/cross-functional team was a tight-knit, high-performing group. We had one or two goals we all worked on each sprint and we broke down work so that we could operate in parallel. When someone was stuck and needed help, there was always somebody ready to jump to their aid and keep them moving. Team meetings were upbeat, fun, and productive. We were regularly paying down tech debt while our experiments gathered data. The vibe was helpful and collaborative.
Now, thanks to AI, we are shipping more than ever. We have as many goals every sprint as engineers. Rather than parallelizing work on one feature or experiment at a time, we parallelize the experiments. The vibe has shifted.
When someone gets stuck, it’s hard to find help. People view meetings as a waste of time – and honestly, they are. Instead of collaboratively solving a problem, everyone shares a status update while the rest of the group half-listens, knowing the update doesn’t affect them.
Are we a team or collection of individuals? #
What distinguishes a team from a collection of individuals? Research over the past 25 years has consistently found a few markers of what makes a team:
- Teams have shared goals, with collective progress and success – and failure. If part of the group can succeed while another fails, that indicates a group is not operating as a team. It also creates competitive, rather than collaborative, priorities, since everyone is incentivized to work toward their own goals. With fewer, shared goals, team members are incentivized to work together to achieve them. - Team members’ work is interdependent. Team members often have complementary skills, and rely on each other to make progress toward those shared goals. Even where skills overlap, engineering teams have typically had practices like code reviews that ensured interdependence. - Teams are stable. As Richard Dalton, chief design officer at Verizon, once observed: teams are immutable structures. Any change means you have a new team, one that has to go through the stages offorming-storming-norming-performingagain. The more stable and clear the team membership, the more time you spend at the performing stage.
AI has helped some engineers ship entire features on their own, at a cost of being more isolated. Independence may mean less friction, but it also means a weaker team bond. That friction often takes the form of communication and collaboration, which are key opportunities to propagate and reinforce team culture.
More like this #
Collaboration reinforces culture #
We can think of culture as “the way we do things around here.” It’s built from the behaviors that are celebrated and encouraged, tolerated, and discouraged or prohibited. Those norms are established and reinforced through everyday interactions between team members.
A collection of individuals may not have a shared culture – each may have a different way of doing things. They may value different aspects of the work, and with independent goals, they may not see value in working together or supporting each other at all. Instead of getting answers from each other, with the stories, battle scars, and lessons that came along with them, they get answers distilled by the AI. There are fewer shared experiences.
How staff+ engineers influence culture #
As leaders, staff+ engineers have an outsized impact on culture. The organization holds us up as examples, and our success within the org encourages others to mirror our behaviors and value our advice. If culture is the way we do things, then we can influence the culture by encouraging or discouraging certain behaviors.
Celebrating a choice someone made or an action they took – whether within the team as a brief shout-out or in broader venues like Slack #kudos channels – sends a message that we, and so the org as a whole, want to see more of that choice. Sharing stories outside the team, especially if you cover multiple teams and can see the results directly, helps spread and normalize that way of working.
If the venues to celebrate the team don’t exist, we can create them. We can create a Slack channel, or to encourage sharing shoutouts during team ceremonies. In a particularly overt example, a previous employer of mine had a company-wide Legend award, that passed from IC to IC, given to someone who exemplified the company values, and was awarded at a company all-hands every two weeks.
Another way to create a shared sense of how we work is to write it down in a team charter. Taking the lead on writing a charter or working agreement, while soliciting input and feedback from the team, can not only trigger cultural conversations, but also create a common resource to point back to to help guide decision-making. It’s important to refer to the charter, and update it as necessary, to avoid it becoming a write-only document.
Finally, we can model behaviors. As leaders within the org, our team members see the way we act as valued and worth emulating. When we are trying to create a habit of celebrations and shout-outs, we can help by sharing them ourselves. Explaining our decision-making processes lets the team see how to apply the same values and priorities – to learn how “it depends” looks in practice.
Berlin • November 9 & 10, 2026
Close the gap between what leadership expects and what’s actually possible at LeadDev Berlin.
Final thoughts for staff+ engineers #
AI is driving a shift to more autonomous work within teams, which means opportunities to establish culture that used to be automatic – time spent pairing, organizing work around shared goals, planning and designing together – now require deliberate choices.
We went through a similar shift with the rapid increase in remote work, when interactions that had been part of being in a shared space required creative replacements.
The good news is that, as staff+ engineers, we already need to be the glue within and across our teams. We can use that time – communicating, documenting, planning, sharing, reviewing – to establish and reinforce the way the team does things.
With clear, high-performance goals in mind, we can intentionally seek and create the opportunities we need to build the habits and norms that shape the team culture.