Justin Jackson
Co-founder of Transistor.fm, a podcast hosting and analytics platform.
“What's coming down the pipes now are companies like AMP that are saying it's possible that a lot of that stuff was just cruft and just performance theater anyway. It was a process designed to make people feel good and to make people busy.”
The Panel · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · November 2026
Context
The panel was discussing how Amp, the coding-agent company, runs with no mandatory pull requests or quarterly goals. Justin Jackson suggests that much of the standups-and-story-points process may never have been needed.
Transcript
…I... You just said something that I think also implicit in that process was this comfort that a lot of the process gave my job purpose. So some people liked writing pull requests because that part of the process made them feel whatever important, whatever. It filled a space for them professionally.
Okay. So it was like defined. I do this. I contribute. My team contributes this part of
the process. And there's this idea because it was accepted. Like, of course, everybody's gonna do a stand up every day. Of course, you're gonna use Agile. Of course, we're going to assign point systems to each of these stories, and we're gonna pivot... Put it into Pivotal Tracker, and we're gonna track it as a iteration and all these other things that were... What's coming down the pipes now are companies like AMP that are saying it's possible that a lot of that stuff was just cruft and just performance theater anyway. It was a process designed to make people feel good and to make people busy.
But it may have been necessary. The question is, is it still necessary?
I think they're both interesting questions. I'm just kind of enjoying this moment of 37signals attacked these sacred cows. And now we're in this new moment where these companies like are kind of attacking some sacred cows.
These are like deep sacred cows.
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