Keep Moving Forward | X-Team Magazine

The AI Skills Gap Is Bigger Than Your Hiring Plan

lance@repcap.com (Lance Haun) — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:17:29 GMT

Martin Krause was called in to assess an AI rollout that looked, by every available metric, like a remarkable success. What he found was a perfect example of the AI skills gap in action.

Why Better AI Governance Is Your Fastest Path to Scale

Gemma Versace — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:51:43 GMT

Most organizations treat AI governance like a speed bump. Something to get through before the real work starts.

Arnaud Grunwald on AI and Performance Management's Future

Gemma Versace — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:52:35 GMT

Most organizations collect more feedback than they know what to do with. Surveys, pulse checks, one-on-ones, performance reviews — the data exists. What rarely follows is evidence that any of it changed anything. Arnaud Grunwald has spent the better part of a decade working on that gap, and he has a clear view of why it's still so hard to close.

Arnaud is chief product officer at ClearCo, a talent platform covering the full employee lifecycle — from sourcing and hiring through performance, learning, and compensation — for more than 3,000 mid-market companies. He came to the role through Betterworks, where he led product for four years after selling his employee listening startup Hyphen to them. The through line across those chapters is the same problem: building systems that make feedback useful, not just frequent.

In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, Arnaud joins host Gemma Versace to talk about why the philosophy behind the annual performance review no longer holds up, what real AI adoption looks like when it reaches every team in the business, and what the next era of performance management is actually going to demand.

New Tips: How to Hire the Best Software Developers

X-Team — Mon, 25 May 2026 01:18:56 GMT

The resumes pile up. The screening calls happen. The technical interviews run their course. And you still end up with someone who clears every step and then, six months in, needs constant direction, avoids hard conversations, and can't explain a technical decision to anyone outside engineering. It's never been harder to know how to hire the best software developers.

AI Literacy: Why Confidence ≠ Capability in Skill Assessment

Gemma Versace — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:13:43 GMT

Most people think they have a pretty good idea of what thay are capable of at work. What Dustin Clinard has found, repeatedly, is that they don’t. The data shows people tend to overestimate their communication skills and underestimate their analytical thinking. The leaders who are most confident about their self-awareness tend to score the worst.

Dustin is the CEO of Ignis AI, which produces verified, confidence-weighted skill profiles based on scenario-based observation rather than self-reporting. The research roots run through Harvard, Microsoft and the OECD.

On this episode of the Keep Moving Forward podcast, Dustin and I explore the consequences of making talent decisions based on such unreliable data and why the Ignis team decided to focus on developing verified, confidence-weighted skill profiles based on scenario-based observation rather than self-reporting.

Outsourcing Software Development to a Dedicated Team: Helpful Tips

X-Team — Fri, 08 May 2026 22:31:22 GMT

When the backlog is outrunning your team and hiring won't close the gap fast enough, outsourcing software development to a dedicated team is often the best move to unstick things. You get embedded engineering capacity without the four-to-six month drag of a full recruitment cycle, and at a lower total cost than building the same function in-house. That math is real.

How to Hire Offshore Software Developers the Right Way

X-Team — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:35:20 GMT

Figuring out how to hire offshore software developers is, for many engineering leaders, less of a talent search and more of a post-mortem waiting to happen. The engagement gets stood up fast, the hourly rates look great, and six months later the codebase is a mess and nobody can explain why.

Rethinking Hybrid Work: Agile and Intentional Workspaces

Gemma Versace — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:34:03 GMT

The return-to-office debate has been running for years, and most of it has been framed wrong.

When Experimentation Can't Outrun Accountability

Gemma Versace — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:15:39 GMT

For most tech leaders, a bad call means a missed milestone. For Kevin Andrews, it might mean a lot of people won’t get paid.

Kevin is president of PrismHR and CTO of Vensure Employer Solutions — two companies at the center of an HR and payroll network serving more than 160,000 small businesses and processing nearly $160 billion in payroll annually. Vensure has completed more than 100 acquisitions since 2018, and Kevin has been at the helm of integrating all of it. He co-founded his first company straight out of college, scaled it through a private equity roll-up, and eventually sold to Alight Solutions — a Blackstone-backed company — before helping take Alight public. He's been building and operating mission-critical platforms ever since.

In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, I met with Kevin to examine what responsible innovation looks like when the stakes are this concrete — where "move fast and break things" simply isn't a philosophy available to you. We covered AI governance, the limits of vibe coding at scale, the upskilling imperative, and the leadership principle he returns to again and again: give your people the tools, and then trust them.

Risks of Outsourcing Development for Companies Explained

X-Team — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:39:51 GMT

The risks of outsourcing development aren't evenly distributed. Some engineering teams run faster, ship more, and stay leaner by bringing in external talent. Others end up with missed deadlines, brittle codebases, security incidents, and vendors who overpromised from the first call.

What separates those two outcomes usually isn't the decision to outsource — it's often the vendor model they chose and whether it was designed for what they actually needed.