Stellar Work

Benjamin Igna

Work is broken. Not in a LinkedIn-thought-leader way. In a "we spent 18 months on a transformation and nothing changed" way. Ben unpacks what actually moves the needle with practitioners, engineers, and leaders who've been through it. New episodes every two weeks.

  1. 5h ago

    #66 Petra Wille - How to lead a product org in the age of AI

    Petra Wille thinks measuring your team's token usage is one of the worst things a leader can do right now. She explains what to measure instead.Petra is a product leadership coach, author of STRONG Product People, and co-organizer of Product at Heart, one of Europe's largest product conferences. She works with the people who line-manage product managers, designers and researchers, which makes her a good read on what AI is actually doing to product organizations instead of what LinkedIn says it is doing.What you'll hear:Why every AI question in the company ends up on the product leader's desk, and why that is not new (mobile and APIs went the same way)The AI maturity curve: experimentation feels like more work before it feels like less, and most teams quit during the "more work" phaseWhat happened when teams tried to replace engineers with vibe coding, or replace product people with Claude-written backlog items (none of it went well)Why the eight-engineers-per-product-manager ratio is broken and three is the number she now sees workingLearning headlines: giving every direct report one three-to-four-month learning focus instead of a training budget nobody usesWhy artificial users and AI-run interviews still lose to talking to actual humansPetra Wille: https://www.petra-wille.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petra-wille-b8b1329/STRONG Product People: https://www.strongproductpeople.comProduct at Heart: https://productatheart.comAll Things Product podcast (with Teresa Torres): https://www.producttalk.org/all-things-product/More episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.pageNewsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarworkHost: Ben, founder of Stellar Work

    #66 Petra Wille - How to lead a product org in the age of AI

  2. Sep 7

    #65 Matt LeMay - The Low-Impact AI Death Spiral

    Matt LeMay thought product teams had finally outgrown the feature factory. Then AI handed everyone a faster conveyor belt.Matt is a product consultant and author who has worked with Google, Spotify, and MailChimp. His book Impact-first Product Teams gave a name to what happens when teams optimize for safe, visible output: the Low-Impact Death Spiral. AI, he argues, is accelerating it.What you'll hear:- Why low-impact work compounds: every harmless little feature raises the cost of doing impactful work later- The rhinestone problem: decorate the car long enough and you can't open the hood anymore- Discovery theatre: how AI lets teams simulate discovery without learning anything- Why "trust is a feeling" and can't be automated- An actual impact-first AI story: how MailChimp's team reframed its subject line helper after qualitative researchLinks:Matt's website: https://mattlemay.comMatt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattlemay/Impact-first Product Teams: https://www.amazon.com/Impact-first-Product-Teams-Success-Indispensable/dp/B0DVH4R3QJMore episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.pageNewsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarworkHost: Ben, founder of Stellar Work

    #65 Matt LeMay - The Low-Impact AI Death Spiral

  3. Aug 24

    #64 Laura Tacho - You weren't measuring well before AI either

    AI did not break engineering metrics. It made it obvious that most companies never had any worth trusting.Laura Tacho spent 15 years building developer tools, ran DX as CTO, and now works on developer experience at AWS. She has seen the measurement data from hundreds of engineering organisations, which makes her a hard sell on the 10x productivity story.What you'll hear:The 17x jump in code volume that barely moves the number of shipped releasesWhy token leaderboards work for a while, then start rewarding the wrong thingWhy any engineering metric measured per individual is a red flagHow to start measuring with a survey instead of a data pipelineThe question most CTOs go silent on: what problem is AI actually solving hereLinks:Laura on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauratachoLaura's research and writing: https://lauratacho.comFree developer experience survey template: https://getdx.com/guide/devex-survey-template/Writing Code vs. Shipping Code, NBER 35275: https://www.nber.org/papers/w35275More episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.pageNewsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarworkHost: Ben, founder of Stellar Work

    #64 Laura Tacho - You weren't measuring well before AI either

  4. Aug 10

    #63 Teresa Torres - Taste won't save your product

    Teresa Torres calls the "all you need is taste" narrative what it is: Silicon Valley elitism dressed up as product wisdom.Five years after Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa has gone from product discovery coach to building AI products herself. In this conversation she explains why that transition happened, and why most teams get AI-assisted discovery wrong.What you'll hear:- Why a founder's taste doesn't matter, but matching the customer's taste does- The difference between using AI to think better and letting AI think for you- Why interview synthesis is not a prompt: correction loops, hallucination checks, framing checks- What Teresa is building with Vistaly: AI-generated interview snapshots and opportunity solution trees- When to build your own tools and when SaaS still wins- How teaching LLMs and onboarding humans turn out to be the same skillLinks:Teresa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teresatorres/Product Talk: https://www.producttalk.orgContinuous Discovery Habits: https://www.producttalk.org/continuous-discovery-habits-book/Story-Based Customer Interviews course: https://learn.producttalk.orgVistaly: https://vistaly.comMore episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.pageNewsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarworkHost: Ben, founder of Stellar Work

    #63 Teresa Torres - Taste won't save your product

  5. Jul 27

    #62 Barbara Lampl - There is no such thing as AI strategy

    If your leadership is discussing which AI tool to buy, they are having the wrong discussion.Barbara Lampl has built and fixed data and AI strategies for over 20 years. Behavioral mathematician, known on LinkedIn as AI Babsi. Her diagnosis of failed AI adoption is blunt: organizations refuse to redesign their processes, and the knowledge that actually runs the business was never written down.What you'll hear:- Why every process needs touching before an LLM goes near it- How to capture tribal knowledge before your experts retire, and why exit interviews never work- RAG as an umbrella term: when vectors are enough, when you need a graph, and the six-month trade-off between them- The token math of file formats: PowerPoint costs a factor of 9 to 13, markdown wins- Her take on the Claude Fable 5 re-rollout and why Europe has no Anthropic of its own- The first step for a leadership team stuck in tool discussions: C-level trainingLinks:Barbara on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbaralampl/The Data AI Institute: https://www.data-ai-institute.comMore episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.pageNewsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarworkHost: Ben, founder of Stellar Work

    #62 Barbara Lampl - There is no such thing as AI strategy

  6. Jul 13

    #61 Thomas Dohmke - Let the rebellion begin

    Thomas Dohmke predicted AI would write 80% of code within five years. The number held. The timeline didn't. It took three.Thomas ran GitHub as CEO through the Copilot years. Now he's building Entire, a developer platform for the era where agents write the code. In this episode he explains why that platform can't be built on files and folders, and why it took a new company to build it.What you'll hear:- Entire Blame and Entire Why: the prompts and reasoning stored in the repo, next to the commit- The distributed Git network announced in Berlin, with regional mirrors built for agent traffic- Why feeding all company knowledge into one vector database keeps failing- Secret redaction before session logs ever leave your machine- Whisper-coding, profanity as context, and conducting an orchestra of agentsRecorded at WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin.Entire: https://entire.ioThomas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashtom/Entire's Discord: https://discord.gg/jZJs3Tue4SMore episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.pageNewsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarworkHost: Ben, founder of Stellar Work

    #61 Thomas Dohmke - Let the rebellion begin

  7. Jun 8

    #60 Benjamin Igna - The substitutes for real work

    Every industry has invented a substitute for the actualwork, and the best practitioners have quietly stopped using it.   Sixty episodes in, Ben spends a solo episode tracing onepattern that showed up across 40-plus practitioners in five countries. The"sticker in the drawer" wears different clothes everywhere. Sometimesit's a sprint ceremony, sometimes an AI pilot with no measurable outcome,sometimes a dashboard that counts inputs and calls it progress.   What you'll hear: Why Sander Hoogendoorn at iBOOD killed sprints, retros andthe Scrum Master role, and ships changes before lunch instead. Why the agile mindset is always someone else's problem, andwhat the research from Karen Eilers and Christiaan Verwijs says actually movesthe needle (it's leadership behaviour, not more artifacts). The AI section: why every human in the loop is a bottleneck,why time-on-task goes up 20 to 40 percent with AI tools, and the MIT findingthat 95 percent of GenAI pilots show zero measurable impact. The disappearing junior pipeline, and why Sander and Shopifyhire more juniors, not fewer. The MIT EEG study on what happens to your brain when youprompt first and think second.   Newsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarwork   More episodes & all platforms:https://stellarwork.start.page Newsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarwork Host: Ben

    #60 Benjamin Igna - The substitutes for real work

  8. May 25

    #59 Carsten Kraus - Industrial AI, keep the data in-house

    Carsten Kraus's pitch for the German Mittelstand isn't to build foundation models. It's to keep the data in-house and let other people's models run on it.Kraus has founded 12 companies and is opening the 13th. He sold a programming language to Atari at 17, built FactFinder (similarity search two years before Google's "Did you mean"), and Casablanca.ai, a face foundation model that hit 88% AUC on stroke detection in five days with 150 training images. Germany's Business Angel of the Year 2024. Lives in Pforzheim by choice.What we get into:- Why Aleph Alpha lost on capital and compute, not technology- How DeepSeek and Kimi made training cheap, and what that resets- Running Qwen 3 (~27B) on a Mac Mini, and RAG on a 4090- The worldview baked into training data: death penalty, the m-dash giveaway, contracts that quietly skew toward US legislation- The conspiracy-theory fine-tune they ran but never released- Why the actual European edge is industrial AI on top of Germany's 1,800 hidden champions- The hyperscaler trap: the US-East-1 outage, the UK tax software, and CLOUD Act exposureCarsten Kraus on LinkedIn: https://de.linkedin.com/in/carstenkrausCasablanca.ai: https://www.casablanca.aiCK Holding / Brainbox: https://www.ck-holding.deMore episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.pageNewsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarworkHost: Ben, founder of Stellar Work

    #59 Carsten Kraus - Industrial AI, keep the data in-house
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About

Work is broken. Not in a LinkedIn-thought-leader way. In a "we spent 18 months on a transformation and nothing changed" way. Ben unpacks what actually moves the needle with practitioners, engineers, and leaders who've been through it. New episodes every two weeks.

Information

  • Creator
    Benjamin Igna
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    65
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Benjamin Igna
  • Show Website
    Stellar Work

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