Weekly thematic automation sprints — 13-person SaaS to 3 + freelancers in 6 months

Reorganize the company around AI agents in weekly thematic sprints — one functional area per week — while giving agents read access to the full company context (codebase, technical docs, decision history) as a "second brain" + an AI board of directors for strategic questions. Hire only people who can orchestrate agents, not those who manage humans.

Reported outcome from one founder: 13 staff → 3 + a few freelancers over six months, plus a pipeline of new internal products. First built product on top of the second brain: a daily sales-strategist agent that runs on every client's sales numbers and recommends actions grounded in the product's actual capabilities.

1. Build the second brain first. Read access for agents to codebase, technical docs, decision history. Substrate for every later sprint.
2. Codify dev philosophy + PRD recipe as a skill. Sit with the agent and write down how you evaluate hypotheses and what makes a PRD ready. The templates themselves are not in source ([needs founder input]); the principle — codify these into a skill so the agent shares your lens — is what the operator reports works.
3. Spin up the AI board of directors. A small agent cluster that reads the second brain and answers strategic questions (competitive position, what to ship, margin leaks). Decision support, not decision-making.
4. Run weekly thematic sprints. One functional area per week. Documented week 1 = Marketing + Sales (cold outreach, qualification, enrichment, channel campaigns). Documented week 2 = Finance, mapping cash flow toward auto-reports. Source gestures at later weeks (new-feature marketing automation + PR, support optimization) but does not enumerate the full sequence. Each sprint ships a working automation by Friday or it doesn't ship that week.
5. Set up competitor + industry-news pipeline. Daily scan; agent recommendations flow into roadmap.
6. Change the hiring filter. From this point, hire only people who can orchestrate agents — not those who manage humans (verbatim rule below).
7. Compress headcount on cadence, not in one cut. The 13 → 3 reduction took 6 months of weekly sprints, not one layoff.

Hiring filter rule:

Hire only people who can orchestrate agents — not those who manage humans.

• Don't build agents before the second brain. Agents without context produce generic advice and lose credibility internally.
• People manager ≠ agent orchestrator. Don't auto-promote your current people-managers; several operators report human-management instincts actively hurt agent orchestration.