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No amount of tooling makes an organization go faster or do better. AI has made that clearer than anything else I’ve watched in nine years of doing this. What it has produced instead is what people are now calling the human wreckage of AI.
How I Met Angela Dugan
So one day I’m cruising around LinkedIn, in a market where nobody can get hired and companies swear they can’t find anyone, and here’s someone doing something simple. She posted about a role she wasn’t hiring for. Didn’t have the requisition, and said so right in the post. It felt awkward, it felt vulnerable…and she put it up anyway, Because she wasn’t willing to wait until she desperately needed somebody before she started meeting people.
She got dozens of replies in days. Almost every one of them said the same thing. “It’s a relief to talk to a human.”
That’s Angela Dugan. She’s VP of Product Delivery at Red Foundry in Chicago, and she went first while everyone else was feeding resumes into a machine.
Stop Looking For Your Past Roles
You’ll hear about the advice that ended her own job search, which is the part I want you to sit with: stop looking for your past roles. Look for the activities you want to do, the outcomes you want to drive, the impact you want to have. She stopped hunting for anything with “agile” in the title. That’s how she got a director job at Microsoft, and the VP job she has now.
She shares the story of her layoff. She was cut from Microsoft when the AI money started moving and the people money stopped. Two days later she left a comment on somebody else’s post. Not an ask, just empathy for someone in the same wave. And her future CEO saw it. Someone she’d consulted for back in 2014 and never stopped talking to.
Ten years of keeping one relationship warm. That’s the whole story.
The Human Side of Business and Tech
This episode is about the human side of tech, AI and Agile. Right now the job market is breaking, but it won’t stay that way. Know why? Because results speak. And what we learn from Angela Dugan is that doing things the right way (which could mean leveraging AI, but not just throwing tasks carelessly over the fence to AI) gets noticed. Because the RIGHT people make impact. They touch the bottom line.
And isn’t that what we’ve been talking about here on Badass Agile? Outcomes. Not frameworks, nor conventions. Not fashion or trends or fast money.
Find Angela Dugan: LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/andugan/ (Put a note in the request.)
She’s also at the local Chicago events and at VS Live.
Show Notes
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