You’re reading AI at the Top - Our new series on Sundays, where we share how leading companies and their executives use AI in business.
Imagine LinkedIn in 2011.
The company was experiencing fast user growth. But it struggled to keep up with demand. Engineers were burned out. Users were frustrated with service interruptions or broken features.
To solve this, a VP of engineering who only joined LinkedIn a few months ago decided to freeze the development of all new features.
He asked his engineers to only work on fixing LinkedIn’s architecture for the next two months.
It was a bold move considering the company had just gone public.
With this strategy, LinkedIn paid down a decade of technical debt. It increased system stability, made scaling easy, and shipped new features fast.