The Skill of Go Figure It Out

We stopped documenting our workflows.

A few months ago at Pony we started writing down how we use AI. Which tool for what, in what order, which prompts work, which don’t. Real effort. Proper document.

Two weeks in, half of it was outdated. A month in, almost all of it. Models had moved, new tools had landed, better ways of doing the same thing had appeared. The document was a fossil before we’d finished writing it.

We stopped. The workflow wasn’t the point.

The thing that’s actually getting better isn’t our process. It’s our figuring it out.

Last week I had to put together wireframes for an internal session with the team. Timeline shifted, no time to do them the way I usually do. So I improvised. Dumped every bit of context I had - client transcripts, competitor sites, the current site - into a few AI tools at once. Got them generating, got them reviewing each other’s output, sat in the middle calling what worked and what didn’t. A couple of hours later I had something I could share confidently with the team. Nobody told me to do it that way. There was no process for it. I went and figured it out.

That’s the skill. We call it Go Figure It Out.

Two words doing two jobs.

Go - don’t wait, don’t ask, don’t sit on it until you feel ready. The shelf life on “ready” is about a fortnight.
Figure it out - use your brain, not a manual. Try things. Break things. Read the docs when you’re stuck, half the time they’re out of date anyway.

This is quite uncomfortable. It’s the opposite of how most of us learned to work. You were the person who knew the thing. You had the experience, the qualification, the years on the tool. That was your value. Now the tool is six months old and the person sitting next to you, who picked it up last Tuesday, is producing the same output. Sometimes better, because they haven’t yet decided what it can’t do.

Go Figure It Out is the main thing we’re hiring for now. Not “knows X tool.” Not “five years experience in Y.” We want people who, when handed something they’ve never seen, get curious rather than defensive.

The next time you don’t know how to do something, that’s not a problem.

That’s the job.

Love,

Stef