Meet Soffi: the first truly collaborative workplace for product development

Over the last few years, AI has undeniably transformed the pace of software engineering. An individual engineer can ship 10-100x faster than ever before.

Yet, it is less clear to me that the pace of product development has been transformed in the same way. By product development, I am referring to the broader processes by which a group of engineers, designers, product managers, and other stakeholders (sales, support, etc) decide what should be built, align on a plan to build it, and then deliver it.

Part of this stems from the fact that traditional methods & tools of alignment - the PRD, the Figma file, the planning meeting - are too mismatched with the new pace of delivery. Why mock out something if you can prototype it in 10 seconds with Claude Code? Why write a spec if the engineer can implement a v0 in 1/10th of the time? This new mode is faster if you look at it purely from a time-to-first-solution perspective, but we’ve lost something in terms of making sure we’re building the right thing at a high degree of quality.

Another part of it stems from the fact that software development has become much more single-player. Individuals on software teams spend their days iterating with Claude locally until a feature is done, commit the full feature, and ship it after an AI code review. There is less and less opportunity for genuine human feedback and input as you build. One CTO even recently told me he no longer allows multiple engineers to work on the same feature at the same time because the collaboration overhead isn’t worth it. This solves one problem, but it creates another.

A final facet is that PMs and designers are being left behind. The most technical, ambitious people in these roles have essentially become engineers themselves, using AI coding tools to in many cases, increasingly deliver software themselves. What about the rest who don’t know how to clone a repo locally? More fundamentally, even if your entire design team can learn how to use Claude Code, I think something has been lost in terms of the traditional purpose these roles played - the brainstorming, the creative thinking, the mapping of user needs back to what is being shipped. Which is ironic - because when it's much easier to write code, these things actually matter more.

In short, engineers are faster, but teams are not. Yet, teams ultimately determine whether you deliver a product, not just ship a set of features. Solving this requires a new type of foundational infrastructure for collaborative, agent-driven software development - and we think that is Soffi.

Soffi is the first collaborative development environment for enterprise product teams. It turns your company's product into a live workspace where designers and product managers work alongside engineers on real, deployed software, transforming product ideas into production-ready software in a single collaborative environment.

Within Soffi, you can do anything from refining your design system, to editing text or visual layouts to using AI to explore brand new feature concepts. All edits are done in a workspace connected to your code, design system, and your data, meaning that any change you make can be shipped as a PR directly from Soffi. Critically, everything is collaborative, so your entire team can play a role in the product development process.

In this sense, Soffi isn’t really a prototyping tool, or a concepting tool, or a new type of design tool. It’s all of the above and more - a shared place to explore ideas, get feedback from your team, and hand-off ideas across the organization.

Soffi was founded by Cris Dobbins, and in many ways is the perfect encapsulation of her career. Cris spent the last two decades building developer products and infrastructure tools, most notably leading design at HashiCorp for many years.

Her experience building high end enterprise infrastructure led her to understand what it means to build a collaborative product workspace for serious professional teams, not just people building personal websites or micro-apps. And her distinctive intersection of skillset in UX design and developer tools led her to realize that rethinking product development in an age of AI is not simply a workflow problem, but also an infrastructure one. If you want to collaboratively develop on top of your actual product, Soffi needs to run your product, and thus Soffi is just as much a platform-as-a-service company as it is a new AI design workflow.

It is therefore remarkable to see the pace by which Cris and her team have executed since we pre-seeded the company last year. Soffi is an incredibly technically ambitious company that requires pushing the boundaries of web engineering, platform engineering, and AI. Yet, in only eight months, Cris and her team have managed to build an initial version of the product that is already being used by companies ranging from early stage startups to large enterprises.

Having used Soffi over the last few months, all I can say is that the product is magical and in many respects, is the product I desperately wish I had when I was a product manager. As of today, you can try it too by signing up to be part of Soffi Originals, a group of early users who will help shape what Soffi becomes. If you do, what you’ll invariably see is that Soffi is a true labor of love; Cris’ passion for this problem shines through in every single facet of the company - the animations, the easter eggs, the UX subtleties, the playful and distinctive brand.

As AI continues to improve and building anything becomes easier, in many respects I think what will remain is simply the question of what do we as a team want to build and why? The best way to answer that will be Soffi.