Sanja Grbic describes a 30-day experiment in which Automattic paused roadmap work for participating teams and let them build real projects. The talk reports roughly 500 participants and 794 initiated projects, not 794 proven production successes. Preparatory work included role-specific AI training, accessible development environments and documented company knowledge available through an internal MCP server.
Sanja Grbic's three examples trace different forms of collaboration: a short group exercise building a board-game session manager, a design-system status tracker that she developed and deployed, and a merchant-chat proof of concept built with another designer. Working prototypes became the main design artifact, with Figma used later for selected visual refinement rather than the entire handoff process.
Sanja Grbic attributes the change to more than model capability. Engineers helped colleagues learn version control, teams kept planning and implementation context together, and designers could own delivery decisions. The talk offers an individual case study of changed work practices, not a controlled productivity comparison or a claim that organizational security and engineering expertise are unnecessary.
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