One of the benefits of being an independent consultant is significantly decreasing the time I spend dealing with cross-functional misalignment.

Or so I thought. The meetings are still happening. They're just in my own head.

Last week I was building some agents that I'm launching (more on that soon), and I caught myself in a full-blown interdepartmental conflict. With myself.

It started with Sales me. Sales me looked at the agents and said "these are pretty good, but no one's going to pay for them unless they have these 5 things. Also, how are we going to position against someone just using Claude to do the same thing?"

Product me fired back immediately. "Are you kidding? This is SO much better than someone trying to do this in an LLM on their own. Hey Marketing - make that crystal clear in the messaging."

CEO me cut them both off. "Great points, all of you. Let's do all of it and launch next week."

Engineering me, who had been quietly fuming, finally spoke up. "You know what would help? If you approved the upgrade to Claude Max."

(I approved the budget request. Also me.)

We shipped everything CEO me asked for. And I think we've made it clear in the positioning, but that'll be tested next week.

Here's what I didn't expect about running a solo business with AI: Every tradeoff that used to play out across a conference table now plays out inside your own head. Ship fast or ship complete? Invest in the product or invest in distribution? Build the next feature or sell what you've got?

I used to watch Sales and Product argue and think "why can't these people just align?" Now I'm both of them, and I still can't align.

But also, since I'm able to use AI to function in all these roles myself, I spend more time thinking through these trade-offs.

There's no scheduling a follow-up. No waiting for someone to "circle back." When you're every function, you can fight about it, decide, and move on in the same afternoon.

I think that's the real unlock of the solo AI-powered business. Not that you eliminate the hard tradeoffs — but that you compress the time between tension and decision.

Anyway, I'm launching next week. Product me is writing this newsletter while Claude Code fixes a few bugs.

P.S.