Every real shift a business makes has to clear the same bar: measurable ROI. New tooling, a reworked workflow, a bigger spend, a changed process. If you can’t trace it to a return, you can’t justify it, no matter how impressive the thing is.
I’ve been sitting with this since a fireside chat with Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code. He talked about life on the frontier of AI, where the interface, the workflow, even the nature of the work is being reinvented in real time. It is genuinely transformative. And watching it, the ROI question got more interesting to me, not less.
Here’s the tension. The more transformative the tool, the easier it becomes to adopt it on faith and quietly skip the part where you prove it moved a number that matters. Excitement is not a business case. Velocity is not a business case. A measurable return is.
That is what this carousel is about: the bar every tooling, workflow, and spend decision still has to clear, and why no amount of frontier magic excuses you from clearing it.
The full field note from that fireside chat - engineering metrics vs. the return a board actually measures - is in issue 03 of Selling Serendipity.
