Hey, Luca here, welcome to a weekly edition of the💡Monday Ideas💡 from Refactoring! To access all our articles, library, and community, subscribe to the full version:
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It includes:
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One of the most powerful ideas about company culture is generative culture, about which we wrote a primer last year.
It’s hard to summarize what generative culture is about, but if you ask me, it’s about three main themes: how information flows, how decisions are made, and how failure is handled:
1️⃣ Information flows freely
In generative cultures, information is shared, not hoarded. This means:
📝 Docs are a shared responsibility — everyone contributes, not just seniors.
🔄 Knowledge sharing is systematic — show & tells, learning sessions, cross-team demos.
🤝 Collaboration is the default — teams seek feedback rather than working in isolation.
A strong litmus test is incident handling. The best teams communicate transparently, focus on resolution over blame, and follow up with post-mortems. This creates a virtuous cycle where people feel safe to share problems early and contribute learnings back to the org.
2️⃣ Decisions are made at the right level
Generative cultures aren’t simply bottom-up — they optimize for making decisions at the most appropriate level:
🎯 Strategic decisions — leadership provides direction about goals and tech strategy.
🛠️ Implementation decisions — teams have full autonomy on execution.
🤼 Cross-team decisions — are resolved through collaboration and principles, not authority.
The goal is to make teams move fast, but within clear boundaries. Teams should make good local decisions that align with the bigger picture.
3️⃣ Failure is learning
Generative cultures handle failure distinctively. Instead of looking for someone to blame, they focus on:
🔍 Understanding root causes — especially organizational and systemic factors.
📈 Improving processes — based on lessons learned.
🎓 Sharing learnings — making sure the whole organization benefits.
When people feel psychologically safe, they treat failures as experiments — data points that improve the system. Engineers become more willing to take calculated risks, surface problems early, and discuss them openly.
2) 📊 Intentionally allocating engineering time is a win
Early this year we released a deep industry report on traits and practices that make teams successful.
One of the biggest wins that we found is intentionally allocating engineering time across different swimlanes of work (e.g. maintenance vs improvements vs new features).
Teams that have fixed allocations on some of these (e.g. typically maintenance), display:
+22% time spent as it was planned (55% vs 45%)
+24% projects delivered on time (62% vs 50%)
+14.7% happiness about dev practices (3.57 vs 3.11, out of 5)
+6.7% focus time (3.16 vs 2.96, out of 5)
This is something we often discussed on the newsletter and we were already big fans of, but we were surprised by how strong the correlation is.
Earlier this year I interviewed Dan Shipper, the CEO and founder of Every, one of the world’s most popular publications about AI and our relationship with technology.
To me, Dan is the perfect example of The Creator CEO — a founder / executive who blends strategic work with content creation, and has found a way to balance the two things.
“I made a decision to be like, “I’m a writer, I want to write.” That’s a core part of making this business work. So now I spend a lot of time writing... And that has actually been very good for the business.”
This has shaped how Dan structures his workday:
🌅 Morning focus — He spends mornings with his phone off, fully dedicated to writing.
🧩 Afternoon management — Afternoons are for meetings, strategy, and team collaboration.
📝 Weekly rhythm — For the past year, he’s published every Friday, creating a productive deadline.
Dan believes many creators burn out because they follow traditional business advice that pulls them away from their core creative work. Instead, he suggests a different model:
“To be a creator, you start creating, and if you have product-market fit with the stuff you’re making, you just keep going and hire people to do everything else.”
This approach challenges the startup playbook where founders typically step away from doing the core work as the company grows. Dan, instead, sticks to that because it’s what he loves.
He said that admitting that he wanted to spend half his day writing was initially embarrassing, but ultimately made him a better CEO by forcing him to build systems and empower his team.
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Insightful. The convergence of generative culture and AI agents truly amplifys collective intelligence.