The bottleneck moved The week after Agile on the Beach was an odd one. One day I was supporting our CPO with the board pack, pulling together the engineering story: six months of delivery, tidied into charts. Another I took off to spend at my friends' company, helping them work out how to adopt AI, with the … Continue reading The Bottleneck Moved: An H1 2026 Update
After my talk at Agile on the Beach 2026, a Software Engineer Leader from John Lewis & Partners came over with a question I wasn't expecting. He didn't ask which model we use, whether we prefer Cursor or Claude Code, or which MCP servers I'd recommend. He asked about the AI framework I'd mentioned almost in passing. Could I … Continue reading AI Needs Human Guardrails Too
A few months ago I shared our Q1 AI update and, more recently, some thoughts on our new PDP release at Collecting Cars. Looking back, both stories were really about the same thing. A relatively small engineering team shipping more than I would have thought possible even a year ago. At the time, the conversation … Continue reading Acceleration (Boooost), Confidence and Defence
This week we released PDPv2. Our NextJS Product Display Page. The show me the money page! You can see it for yourself on Collecting Cars and Watch Collecting. The most critical page on the platform. The page where excitement peaks, auctions end, bids fly in, and reliability matters most. If this page fails, we lose revenue, … Continue reading PDPv2 “The Money Page” Released
Foundations To Outcomes A page refresh that took ten weeks in the last iteration took under a week this quarter. Same team. Same headcount. Different way of working. I lead a team of 7 engineers, a data engineer, and a DevOps specialist at The Collecting Group. In Q1 we shifted AI impact across our codebase … Continue reading AI First Q1 2026 Summary
A fireside follow-up, and the bits I wanted to underline I recently did a fireside chat follow-up to my AOTB 2025 AMA talk. It was meant to be simple. A few questions, a few stories, a bit of reality from the last 6 to 12 months. What I didn’t expect was how clearly a few … Continue reading AOTB Fireside Follow-up
The Agile On The Beach replays are live! Since speaking, I’ve had time to reflect on what’s changed, what I got wrong, and how fast AI-first software engineering is evolving. The replay of my AI at Collecting Cars AMA is here... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHBEBt_a7H4 What I Got Wrong On stage, I implied I didn't trust or use … Continue reading AI at Collecting Cars, AMA Replay
I recently joined the team at Hypr Live for a conversation about how we’re using AI in engineering at Collecting Cars and The Collecting Group. It was great to dig into how AI is evolving, and how we’re evolving with it. You can watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMemQgXAw_8 Here are three takeaways from the … Continue reading How We Think About AI at The Collecting Group
Olly Brand 