StaffEng Podcast

How BabyList Accelerated AI Adoption in Engineering with Karynn Ikeda

Karynn Ikeda shares the full arc of how Babylist adopted AI across its engineering organization — from a six-week Windsurf pilot on a single team, to company-wide Claude Code adoption and a bold initiative to onboard product managers and designers into the codebase. She discusses leadership buy-in, measuring developer sentiment over raw velocity metrics, the shift toward agent orchestration, and why the return of joy and creative empowerment may be the most important signal of all.

Hosts: Alex Kessinger & David Noël-Ramos

Guest: Karynn Ikeda — Former Engineering Manager → AI Enablement Program Manager at Babylist (@ktikeda)