How Intercom 2X'd engineering velocity with Claude Code | Brian Scanlan

Suddenly you started realizing that you have to think bigger about things, or that your imagination is now the barrier, not the tool.

How is this not happening in your organization? Like literally the physical limits of my ability to type code are unlocked by AI.

Today we are seeing twice the number of throughput as we did compared to nine months ago on our engineering team. Now it's like, why can't it be 10X?

This is a little bit more of what my instinct tells me is possible, which is if you go all in, if you prepare your team, if you prepare your code base, I think your overall product quality is gonna go up, I think your overall developer experience is going up. There's just so many good things that come out of using these tools and using them correctly.

Backlog zero is a realistic thing for teams to be able to go after. All the things that you wish you'd ever wanted to do, it's now just achievable.

I often advise a lot of CTOs and VPs of engineering when figuring out how to get their engineering team AI pilled, say, "Everything you hate about the code base, go spend a month fixing and see how fast we can speed run that. That's gonna feel really good."

I've been having the most amount of fun in my career over the last three months.

[upbeat music] Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, I am showing how Intercom 2X'd the number of PRs that their R&D department is shipping in just a few months. Brian Scanlan is a senior principal engineer at Intercom, and he is gonna show us truly all of their secrets to getting a large product and engineering organization cooking on Claude Code. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Celigo. Every company today wants AI to improve how work gets done. The fastest way is building it directly into everyday business processes, automating employee onboarding, keeping customer data accurate, managing orders and inventory, or resolving finance and operations issues. When AI lives inside the flow of work, it can update records, trigger approvals, route work, and kick off the next step across systems. That's how teams operationalize AI and deliver measurable results. Celigo makes this possible, and now with Celigo Aura, it's never been easier. Celigo Aura gives you access to the entire platform through natural language, connecting your systems and turning intent into action, all of it under your control. Companies like Databricks, PayPal, and Olipop rely on Celigo to run critical business operations at scale. Ready to operationalize AI? Visit celigo.com/howiai. That's C-E-L-I-G-O.com/howiai. Brian, welcome to How I AI. Why I am so thrilled that you agreed to join the podcast is I think Intercom has done it, which is you all have met the moment in sort of two ways. One, clearly met the moment from a product perspective. We're one of the first companies that had... Sorry, I don't wanna say legacy business, but had a, a going concern business that saw AI coming and really transformed how your product worked for customers, and I'm a happy Fin customer. They did not tell me to say that. And then second, what we're gonna talk about is the team met the moment in terms of really understanding AI was gonna change how, in particular, product engineering and design orgs and engineering organizations were going to work, and you just went full speed at changing how the team works. What, what drove sort of the urgency around meeting the moment? How did that come to be? Was it a single person? Was it everybody? What was your experience?