Saint TeamLead-2026: A 10x Speedup in Development Wipes Out Traditional Project Management

At the Saint TeamLead-2026 conference in St. Petersburg, held right after Saint Highload, the second day opened with a visionary talk by Avenir Voronov on how a 10x speedup in development changes team management.

How a 10x Speedup Breaks the Backlog

Voronov's first thesis: a 10x speedup in development wipes out the current system of planning and management through tasks, along with the established system of metrics. When testing a hypothesis takes a day or two instead of the previous two months, the traditional backlog for a quarter or a year disappears. Each hypothesis brings new information and creates a branching point, rather than simply closing an item on a task list.

According to the speaker, development at this pace will look completely different. Instead of task lists, there will be streams of activity with target vectors and operational maneuvering inside them. The team does not follow a plan laid out in advance for the quarter. It constantly redirects its effort based on the result of the latest tested hypothesis.

«A 10x speedup in development wipes out the current system of planning and management through tasks, along with the established system of metrics», from notes on

Avenir Voronov's talk at Saint TeamLead-2026, published on the conference organizers' blog on Habr.

• The Saint TeamLead-2026 conference took place in St. Petersburg right after Saint Highload
• The main theme of both conferences was the use of AI in development
• The second day of the conference opened with Avenir Voronov's talk, which made two key arguments
• Testing a hypothesis now takes 1-2 days versus the previous 2 months
• The conference ran in four parallel tracks at the same time

How Copilots Change Team Management

The second thesis of the talk concerns the shift of not only developers but also sales staff and other employees to working through copilots. According to the speaker, copilot logs show not just what employees are doing, but how they do it, how they communicate, and what their emotional state is in real time. This fundamentally changes how a team is managed.

Previously, a manager judged the team's workload and mood from reports and one-on-one conversations once a week or every two weeks. If employees' correspondence, code, and work decisions all pass through copilots, the manager gets a nearly continuous view of not only work results but also the team's emotional state at any given moment.

What Other Cases Were Shown at the Conference

Besides Voronov's talk, Saint TeamLead-2026 featured other substantive presentations with concrete cases, for example, a pipeline for migrating services to a different technology stack using AI agents with guaranteed quality. The conference ran in four parallel tracks, so the author of the notes managed to attend only one of them and, by their own admission, the notes turned out incomplete.

What This Means

If hypotheses are tested in a day or two rather than in months, classic quarterly planning and task tracking lose their meaning. Teams move to streams of activity with target vectors instead of task lists, and copilot logs become a source of data not only about employees' work but also about their emotional state. This shifts the very role of the team lead, from controlling a task list to working with a flow of hypotheses and real-time data on the team's state.