For a long time, the way you knew someone was an expert was that they did the work and everyone else waited their turn.
The engineer wrote the code.
The brand designer made the logo.
The analyst built the dashboard.
Everybody else filed tickets, sent briefs, or just gave up and asked again next quarter.
That model is broken. Not just on engineering teams, but in marketing and brand, in analytics and finance, in ops. Everywhere you have an expert function, there's the same tension building: The rest of the company can now do a meaningful piece of that work themselves.
And the expert's instinct is to clamp down. Lock it. Add an approval. Make a rule. Make it stop.
That’s the wrong move.
Instead: Let them cook.
Stop being the only person allowed to make something awesome, and start being the person who defines what awesome is, curates the hell out of it, and makes the company a creation oasis.
Let Them Cook (LTC): Three Scenarios
Engineering.
Code used to be the bottleneck. You had a handful of engineers, a long backlog, and everyone else was queued up. PMs wrote specs and waited. Marketers wanted a landing page tweaked and waited. Finance wanted an internal tool and waited, or built something cursed in a spreadsheet.
Now your PM can ship a prototype in Codex while sitting on the toilet.
Your marketer can scaffold a Would You Rather lead-gen tool in Lovable.
Your finance lead can write a script that pulls from three systems and reconciles them on a tan page with a fancy font and GSAP reveals using Claude Cowork.
Engineering: “Great, more bad code to clean up, more shadow stuff I can't see, more risk.”
The LTC version looks like this.
Set up the lanes: These are the areas where anyone in the company can build vs. places that will get more scrutiny, and here's what awesome looks like.
Set up the off-ramps: When work has legs, here's the submission process, here's where it goes, here's how it gets reviewed cleanly.
Scale Reviewing: Build AI agents (or staff) to take the submissions, put them in the right shape so they’re usable, scored, and presented in productive way to the experts. Imagine a pitch deck + a PR that’s already been QAd, uses the same coding stack, and is ready to go.
The job of your senior engineers shifts. They define what good looks like. The shape of a good prototype, the bar for production, the stack standards, what's allowed in a sandbox, and what has to be rebuilt before it touches a real customer.
The best teams are using AI agents to do the first pass of that review, not engineers. Because your engineers do not want to be the cleanup crew for everything the rest of the company is making. They don't want to have to look at all of it. They want a smart filter that hands them the most interesting work: the best demos, the most promising ideas, the things actually worth turning into a customer-facing product.
So what happens:
Engineers are now curating awesome out of a much larger inbound stream. And the inbound stream is allowed to be wider and messier than it used to be, because there's a smarter filter in the way.
2. Marketing and Brand.
Same pattern, different surface area.
Sales managers can write full drip campaigns with the HubSpot AI writer.
Product Managers can create their own ads from product design using Figma Buzz.
Local employees can fiddle with your logo, try new tag lines, and throw together a deck that uses your brand colors mostly correctly.
Brand and Marketing Leads tense up. Their instinct is the same as the engineer's: pull it back, make a rule, nobody's allowed to do this without us anymore.
Wrong move. Same wrong move.
The LTC Sandbox you want:
Set the lanes: A space where anyone in the company can imagine and riff and mock things up… but they're doing it inside your real brand assets, your tone, your existing copy library, your actual examples.
Set up the off-ramps: When someone wants to share what’s been imagined, a submission for use gives you a clean worktree to understand where and when it can be used (think of the UX of something like ZipHQ, but for production rather than procurement).
Scale Reviewing: Build the system, or the agents (or the creative review), that reshape what people are making into something brand-aligned. Not to flatten it. To find the spark in it and lift it up to your brand's quality bar.
This does two things at once. It lets the whole company contribute creative energy (Your engineers, your salespeople, and your support team all have ideas that are worth catching). And it lets your brand and marketing experts spend their time on the part that's actually their craft: deciding what's great, sharpening the best of it, and putting a spotlight on the ideas worth running with.
You don't want your creative experts to be the only source of creativity. You want them to be the curators of taste.
Letting the whole company cook generates the heat.
Their judgment shapes it.
And most importantly, it doesn't dampen the company's mood; it lights a fire under it.
3. Data and Finance.
Guess who learned SQL!?
Everybody.
Yes, everyone from people ops to procurement can now query the data, build a chart in Notion, and have Google Docs summarize last quarter's numbers and drop it into a document.
And yes, naturally, there will be more errors.
ARR has already been defined three different times since you started reading this article.
The old habit says, lock the warehouse, gatekeep the metrics, make everyone come through the analytics team.
Don't.
Equip them instead.
Set the lanes: Give them consistent definitions, a semantic layer, trustworthy starting points. Make it easy for somebody to do an analysis correctly, and hard to do it wrong without something noticing.
Set up the off-ramps: Build connectors to the places where this data appears. Build agents that connect the dots between what people are pulling and how it's defined, that catch the obvious errors and flag the suspicious ones.
Scale Reviewing: Build a system that tracks data across documents and meetings to see how and where it shows up. Have it add comments in Google Docs or Notion to highlight risks or considerations before sharing data. Have a queue that’s scored by “how rough does this look” for the data team to keep an eye on, as good monitoring systems should have.
The job of your analysts and your finance team shifts in the same way.
They are not the only path to a number anymore.
They decide which numbers actually matter, which trends are real, and what story the data is actually telling.
They simultaneously distill insight from a much larger volume of analysis across the company. They get a pulse on what hypotheses and interesting deep dives the team members are cooking up right now.
That's the job that compounds.
The Hard Part: Willingness
In every expert function, your most senior people have to evolve.
They have to stop thinking of themselves as the sole source of awesome. The only ones capable of writing good code, designing good creative, and finding real insight in the data.
Clinging to that past model means becoming a bottleneck that suffocates everything underneath.
Their new identity is curator of taste:
Inspire them to cook: Define what good looks like.
Point the energy to the right place: Set the lanes where people can safely create, and establish clean submission paths for work that's ready to graduate from the sandbox.
Set the shape that scales YOU: Build, or you fund, the agents and systems that handle review at a volume and shape the inputs in a way humans can't. So it's cheap to do the right thing, and your team isn't drowning in inbound.
Compound your value: You spend your actual judgment on the good stuff, the genuinely interesting stuff, the ideas worth shipping that are already in the right shape to run with.
The hardest part: let the bar for what enters the system be lower.
But that only works if the filter on the way out is so much smarter.
The instinct, when the rest of the company starts doing part of your job, is to defend the perimeter. To say nobody's allowed to do that anymore. I understand it.
But the version of your job that you love the most, and is actually irreplaceable, should be amplified, not threatened.
The taste, the judgment, the sense for what's great, that part is finally being asked to scale.
Everyone else can now bring you ten times more material to choose from. Your job is to choose well, sharpen what you choose, and unleash it.
That's Letting Them Cook. Engineers become curators of what ships. Brand and marketing become curators of what's on-voice. Analysts become curators of what's true.
The fire is already lit across your company.
The only question is whether you're going to stamp on it or aim it.