This week, we’re digging into how this 190-person company kept headcount steady while increasing velocity and cutting costs.
Scale Without Size: How Linktree is Using AI to Accelerate and Do More With Less
Going into annual planning for 2025, Linktree’s executive team faced a choice. The company had evolved from a simple link-in-bio tool into a platform supporting 70 million creators and businesses, building a two-sided marketplace, enabling affiliate commerce, and launching influencer campaign tools. Traditional wisdom pointed to significant headcount growth to keep racing ahead with their ambitious roadmap.
But rather than scaling headcount, they made a different bet, opting to stay lean at the sub-200 people mark and push AI adoption, hard.
Fast forward to this summer and there are a number of early indicators that this strategy is paying off. Headcount is flat, but launch velocity has picked up, costs are down, and tooling adoption is up (so much so that Devin now sits at the top of their internal PR leaderboard).
As you’d expect, there wasn’t any one silver bullet here. “AI is advancing much faster than us humans are willing to change our habits,” says Linktree CTO Farnaz Azmoodeh. “The gap won't close itself — you have to relentlessly push for it. Helping people get over that hump is your number one job as an eng leader right now.”
In this week’s Applied Intelligence essay, Azmoodeh and former CPO Jiaona Zhang (who's since joined Laurel) share exactly how they transformed their organization, including:
- The specific tasks where Devin excels, and the failure modes to watch out for.
- Surprising takeaways, like how using codegen tools effectively is a lot like managing, so senior engineers are actually well positioned to be power users.
- Why we need to go deeper than just saying “prototypes are the new PRD” and the prompt consolidation technique that bridges the gap between vibe-coding and production.
- How execs can personally push AI adoption (Azmoodeh built an automated dashboard and personally DM’d engineers who weren’t using the new tooling) and why they should focus on their own practice:preach ratio.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
- The Review Editors