Are Your People More Productive — or Just Faster? — Claudia Barriga-Larriviere, Startup Flamingo

Every great team Claudia Barriga-Larriviere has seen shares one trait: they're comfortable with discomfort. After nearly 20 years building people and culture inside startups and global enterprises, she thinks most of the AI conversation is quietly dodging the hard, human questions.

In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Claudia — people-and-culture leader and founder of Startup Flamingo — for a practitioner-to-practitioner conversation on how capable people actually build teams. They get into self-awareness as a muscle rather than a gift, why Australia's love of harmony quietly kills direct feedback, and the difference between a genuinely high-performing team and one that's just stressed and running fast off a cliff together.

Then it turns to AI — not as weather to brace for, but as a tool you have to point somewhere. Are your people more productive, or just faster? What do you lose when you automate the uncomfortable parts of the job — the feedback loop, the one-on-one, the human connection — and who is a flattened, agent-run org actually built for? Claudia makes the case that AI should augment an already good team, that you have to build that team first, and that the leaders winning this moment are the ones asking better questions instead of racing to be first.

About the guest

Claudia Barriga-Larriviere is a people-and-culture leader and the founder of Startup Flamingo, with nearly two decades building teams across startups and global enterprises.

Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the production partner behind Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.