This was the first Q1 2026 Office Hours, recorded April 17 with 4 SMB engineering leaders. Below is a summary of what we covered. The full transcript is available in our public repository.
Headline conclusions#
Three things came out of the conversation that surprised even the practitioners on the call:
- DORA P50 baselines have shifted in 2024-2026. All four leaders reported their teams’ Lead Time P50 had improved 30-50% since 2023, mostly attributed to better CI tooling and feature-flag-default-OFF discipline becoming standard rather than aspirational.
- AI governance is the next compliance crunch. Three of four leaders mentioned a concrete EU AI Act readiness project on their Q2 plan. Six months ago, none of them had this in their roadmap.
- The senior-vs-junior hiring debate has flipped. The traditional SMB advice (“hire mid-level, train into senior”) is breaking down — junior engineering productivity has shifted enough with AI tooling that hiring senior + 2 juniors looks measurably better than 2 mid-levels for several of the participants.
What we discussed in detail#
On DORA baselines#
Marek shared that Loomify’s Lead Time P50 moved from 4.2 days to 1.4 days over 18 months. The interventions: trunk-based development, async PR review SLA, parallel CI test execution. Total tooling cost: under €5k/year incremental. Total engineering investment to implement: roughly 6 engineer-weeks across the team.
Anna’s Berlin fintech moved from 6 days to 3 days in the same period — slower because compliance review remains a hard floor for them. Liam’s healthtech is at 5 days and stable; HIPAA gates limit further compression.
The P85 picture is more interesting than P50 across all four teams: P85/P50 ratio of 3-4× is “healthy” per our Lead Time benchmarks article, and all four are in that band.
On AI governance#
Anna brought up the EU AI Act readiness work her fintech is doing in Q2. Specifically: identifying which of their internal AI workflows fall into “limited-risk” vs “minimal-risk” classifications, and what audit-log retention needs to look like for both.
Marek’s company is in the same boat but earlier in the process. Liam’s healthtech has a separate AI governance review tied to medical-device regulation that’s stricter than the AI Act in his use case.
The shared observation: governance is not where SMBs can punt to “later” anymore. The companies that built it in early are the ones whose AI workflows survived to production. The ones that retrofitted are dealing with rebuilds.
On hiring senior vs junior#
The most unexpected conversation. The traditional SMB hiring playbook — “avoid juniors at small scale, hire mid-level engineers who can self-direct” — is shifting in 2026.
Marek argued that with current AI-augmented developer tooling, a junior engineer’s effective output is closer to mid-level circa 2022 than to junior circa 2022. He’s hiring 1 senior + 2 juniors for the same budget that would have gotten him 2 mid-levels two years ago, and his measured velocity is higher.
Anna pushed back: mentoring capacity is the constraint. Hiring 2 juniors requires 6-9 months of senior time that her fintech can’t spare. She’s still optimizing for mid-level hires.
Liam: too small for either path. Hiring whoever has the right context for the immediate problem.
On founder-CTO transition timing#
We went deep on Liam’s situation specifically. Founder-CTO at 11 engineers, growing to ~20 in the next 9 months. Question: when to hire VP Eng?
Group consensus: not yet. At 11 engineers Liam’s direct technical involvement is still high-leverage. The signal to hire VP Eng is when 25%+ of his time goes to coordination and 1:1s, not yet. Re-evaluate at 20 engineers, definitely act before 30. (Detailed framework in our Founder to CTO Transition guide.)
What’s next#
Q2 Office Hours is scheduled for late June 2026. Topics confirmed so far:
- DORA program post-mortems: 6+ month outcomes from Q3 2025 implementations
- The “AI senior engineer” hiring market — what the actual posting-to-hire data looks like
- Compensation frameworks for engineering managers in 5-50 person teams (international comp benchmarking)
Subscribe to be notified — or apply to be a guest speaker.