Mike Spitz

Head of AI & Consumer Engineering @PFF. Building AI products for NFL/NCAA teams. Actively shipping. I post about AI in sports, when NOT to use AI, and I'm here to help when PFF tools break. Previously: FC Barcelona, Premier League, Wimbledon, World Rugby. Big 🎾⛷️🏈 fan

@jb_sprtb We started off with manual, and went to automated. I'd say about 50% is automated at the moment. Our infrastructure is a mix of our own EC2 instances/bedrock, harnesses around tools like factory/claude code, and leaning on CLIs/MCPs from github/linear/apidog and others

@mikespitz_uk I'd be interested to hear about how much of the end to end process described here is manual use of agents vs automated. If automated, what platforms are you using and how are they set up?

Presentation I did at AI Engineer is out -> youtube.com/watch?v=VMemht… Feel free to ask any questions there or here, will be posting as Spitz_PFF on youtube

Thanks for watching! We don't do sprints but we spin up teams for specific initiatives. These get set by upper management, e.g what area should we tackle (wider team has input on this too). At that point there's a collaborative discussion between the SME and myself or other senior engineers on what can feasibly be built. Then each team will have a subject matter expert (SME), designer, and some engineers in it. The SME will drive what we build and when we need to build it. The engineers focus on the how, and at times there are trade-offs/compromises that need to be made. These all get caught in the spec and/or engineering design document, where there's a clear decision log for people to see afterwards. We work in sports so its quite seasonal. There are a few months where fantasy interest is at the highest. Our fantasy SME will tell us what we need to deliver by when to make an impact for our customers. In another business this SME may be a product person, or business analyst or someone who just really knows the industry well (they can even be outside prod/engineering umbrella). The traditional items that get covered in sprint planning are covered in spec documents, and engineering design documents that then drive the creation of the tickets. These specs/engineering design documents can happen whenever, and we encourage the wider team to raise things (we have a /spec-interview skill on cowork so non-prod/eng folks can share ideas in the same format). The way to think about is this is that instead of planning being a cyclical thing that happens every 2 weeks (or 6 if you're doing shape-up), you want to set things up so you're flexible enough that it can be melded to the goal of your initiative. You need to try to be a little ruthless with what unexpected new work/ideas you pick up so you don't lose focus on the original initiative goal.

@mikespitz_uk Thanks for the presentation. May I know what sort of planning you do as part of the sprint ? I know in the presentation it is mentioned that there is no need for sprit planning but in reality some level of planning is required to set and aling on goals to deliver right ?

@businessbarista ai-native

I want to start an AI community for executives. This will be a space for people to share killer use cases, agentic workflows/agents, post-AI org structure, AI governance, AI training/enablement, change management, and more. Comment “AI-native” if you want to join.

Great effort by the team to get this out in such a quick timeframe. And great to finally have transported some FPL concepts (let me know if you spot the nods) to the world of NFL :) In just around a week we've had over 5k people enter. Still time for you to win some tickets if you want #nfl #draft

@IEShane909 @PFF You can edit your submission until a few minutes before the draft starts on Thursday!

@PFF Filled my out five minutes before the Lawrence trade 🤦‍♂️

Think you know how the draft is going play out? Now's your chance to prove it. Submit your predictions and compete for the most accurate draft and win TWO tickets to any NFL game this season Start drafting today pff.com/draft/nfl-draf…

@ryanlovesports Appreciate the feedback Ryan, we're definitely going to try to get things in a quicker spot ahead of the 2026 season. Few cool new things coming as well 👀

@mikespitz_uk Everything is pretty fast aside premium stats

Name a more painful experience than trying to get nfl draft data from pff challenge impossible

@FootballGuy_Al @PFF @JCSportsDetroit X is not agreeing with me 🤦‍♂️ Sorry, do you mind emailing at mike.spitz[at]pff.com If you've tried clearing your cookies, probably need to unlock your account. Good thing is it takes 2 seconds 👍

@mikespitz_uk @PFF @JCSportsDetroit Just DM’d let me know.

@PFF PFF+ annual membership — currently unable to access any Premium Stats (NFL or NCAA) despite being signed in. Additionally, Contact Support is returning an error when submitting requests: “Request not yet submitted. Please check your email to verify and submit your request.” Please advise and resolve as soon as possible.

Excited to announce I'll be speaking at AI Engineer Europe in London in a few days about how we're getting the best out of AI🤓 @aiDotEngineer

If anyones interested on how we're using AI tune in here linkedin.com/events/7437165… #ai

@Shauncore Hey Shaun, if you clear your cookies for our site or use incognito it should work. We're currently looking into this issue as we speak. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Still down today

It's taken less than six months to go from vibe coding to AI-assisted engineering to AI-driven engineering. 🤯