Lean isn’t a limitation. It’s leverage.
By Aaron Jacobson · Head of B2B Growth Marketing at SpaceXSI ·
Every Friday at Priceline, I lost the day.
Not to meetings. To email. We’d downsized the messaging team, so the next day’s sends had landed on me, and Friday meant building Saturday, Sunday, and Monday in one sitting. Custom SQL for the segments, hand-tuned personalization logic, all stitched together on our in-house stack and a SendGrid contract so cheap it felt like getting away with something.
I loved that control. We’d built algorithms that served personalized content to large subscriber lists, and the test wins were big enough to justify the tedium. So when we looked at moving to a third-party ESP, I dragged my feet. Why give up a machine we understood down to the query?
It took almost two years to evaluate and integrate Iterable. When the automation finally clicked on, it was like taking the first breath after almost drowning. The Friday grind was gone. The thing I’d been protecting turned out to be the thing that was quietly eating me alive.
Looking back, it’s almost funny. Work that used to swallow a full day is the kind of thing an AI agent now handles in seconds. I don’t feel replaced by that. I feel unleashed. Ideas I once filed under “no time in this lifetime” I can now build in an afternoon.
That shapes how I see my job today. I lead B2B growth at SpaceXSI in a flat org, and AI agents now handle much of the routine work: daily analysis of each ad platform with suggested experiments, the weekly exec deck, dashboards, first drafts of copy. Lean isn’t a limitation anymore; it’s leverage. The tooling finally caught up to the ambition.
If you’re worried about where all this is headed: more doors are opening than closing. It’s not the first time technology has swallowed an entire way of working, and it won’t be the last. The people who learn the new tools first get to decide what they’re for.