---
title: "Move Early, Commit Carefully"
speaker: Simina Pasat
role: Former VP of Product, GitHub
company: GitHub
conference: Just Product 2026, Munich, 16 October 2026
track: Closing Keynote
slot: 16:30
duration_minutes: 39
video: https://media.product-masterclass.com/just-product-2026/video/09-simina-pasat.mp4
slides: https://media.product-masterclass.com/just-product-2026/slides/09/Just Product 2026 - Simina Pasat - Move Early, Commit Carefully.pdf
page: https://www.product-masterclass.com/just-product-2026/recap/talks/09-simina-pasat.html
language: en
source: automatic transcript of the livestream, edited summary
---

# Move Early, Commit Carefully

**Simina Pasat**, Former VP of Product, GitHub. Closing Keynote, 16:30, Just Product 2026.

> AI made building cheap but promising did not get cheaper, so build to learn and commit only to what deserves a promise.

## Summary

Simina Pasat closed the day with a homecoming. Fifteen years ago she came to Munich for a master's at TUM, worked at hybris, then moved to Seattle for Xbox and GitHub, where she was most recently VP of Product for GitHub and Copilot. She opened with Olympic skier Eileen Gu's line that hard work is overpraised and direction underrated: working harder means punching the wall harder, direction means noticing you can walk around it. Translated to product, hard work is building and direction is deciding what to build, for whom and why. Her warning: it has never been easier to build something nobody wants. The old cost of engineering forced product teams to ask the boring questions early. That forcing function is gone.

Her advice is to build to learn, not to commit. Write down the hypothesis and what success looks like first. Customers loving a demo is not success, because they can love ten other products like it. Two stories showed the gap between a demo and a product. At hybris labs her team built a digital wine shelf that lit up recommended bottles in the store. Retailers loved it, but moving it from the lab into the business was the hard part. At Xbox she worked on Game DVR while Twitch took off. The team built prototypes, but a bet that size needed someone at the very top to commit, and nobody did. AI does not fix that: you can build Twitch overnight, but not the distribution and network effects.

At GitHub she joined Special Projects, formed after the Microsoft acquisition to win back developer trust. In one year they shipped over a hundred changelog improvements, and betas drew tens of thousands of developers. One fast team stress tested the whole organization. Release processes, reviews and a comms team needing days for copy on something built in an afternoon started to break. AI now gives every team that speed, and when judgment cannot keep up, you build the wrong thing faster. Atlassian surveyed about 1,000 product people: 80 percent ship faster with AI, customers see no more value. Customers also stopped waiting. Banks, German carmakers and healthcare companies want to try a demo the same day. IBM found two thirds of CEOs invest before understanding the value.

Her sharpest story came from launching GitHub Copilot Enterprise. While her team was still prototyping AI code review, a financial institution that never ran betas was already piloting pull request reviews with a ten-person startup. Two lessons: build ahead of what today's models can do, and startups may make mistakes a large vendor cannot afford. GA still means security reviews, compliance, SLAs, support, docs and pricing, plus a promise to keep it working for years. She then asked where product advantage still holds. Adoption starts bottom-up, as GitHub and later Cursor, Claude Code and Codex spread from personal accounts into companies, while commitment happens top-down. Value moved from access to usage to impact, and pricing followed from per seat to per token to Intercom's 99 cents per resolved ticket.

If outcomes are what matters, only features that drive the outcome deserve to exist. Anyone can add now; the skill is knowing what to take away. Trader Joe's stocks 4,000 products against a typical supermarket's 50,000 and sells about four times as much per square meter because customers trust the selection. Agents are becoming the customer, and they do not see your onboarding or landing page, only whether the tool call worked. The advantage goes to whoever learns fastest, compounded through context, trust and community. Simina left GitHub this summer and is building hands-on again, running a Friday retro with Claude on what pushed the limits and what she learned. Her closing line: move early enough to learn, and commit carefully enough to endure.

## Key takeaways

1. Before building anything, write down the hypothesis, what you want to learn and what success looks like; customers loving it is not success.
2. Ask the boring questions while the demo is still exciting: does it solve a real problem and will anyone pay for it?
3. Build ahead of what today's models can do, because the model you are using today is the worst one you will ever use.
4. When one team speeds up, check release, review, documentation and comms processes, because they were built for a slower pace and will break.
5. Launch with the outcome, not the feature: show measured impact from internal use and pilot customers, like review time dropping from days to hours.
6. Define one impact metric tied to the problem statement, because boards and CFOs now ask for ROI rather than activation or adoption rates.
7. Spend as much judgment on what to remove, combine or kill as on what to add; users and buyers cannot absorb more.
8. Pick one thing each week that pushes the limits with the goal of learning fast, and run a Friday retro on what you learned.

## Chapters (timestamps in the talk video)

- 0:00 Host intro: how Simina was found
- 1:47 Homecoming and Eileen Gu's direction
- 8:27 Build to learn, not to commit
- 9:19 hybris labs, Xbox and Twitch
- 12:55 GitHub Special Projects breaks the org
- 16:35 Customers stopped waiting
- 18:13 Copilot Enterprise and the startup beta
- 23:01 Adoption bottom-up, commitment top-down
- 26:01 Access, usage, impact and pricing
- 33:15 Agents as customers and closing

## Highlight moments

- 5:21 to 6:34: **Punching the wall harder is not progress**. The Eileen Gu analogy that frames the whole talk, landing on the line that it has never been easier to build something nobody wants.
- 11:06 to 12:29: **Xbox saw Twitch coming and never committed**. A vivid story of a company that had the prototypes but lacked a top-level commitment, and why AI still does not fix that.
- 19:03 to 20:14: **The bank that chose a ten-person startup**. Her biggest learning from Copilot Enterprise: a regulated customer took a risk because the pain was that big, so build ahead of the models.
- 21:31 to 23:01: **Building got cheap, promising did not**. The core argument plus her personal US and Europe synthesis: move fast, then decide what you commit to.
- 31:29 to 32:41: **Trader Joe's: 4,000 products, four times the sales**. A surprising number that makes the case for taking features away instead of adding them.
- 36:11 to 37:20: **Push it until it breaks**. Her closing advice, made credible by her own new chapter of building hands-on after leaving GitHub.

## Quotes

- "In product terms, it has never been easier to build something nobody wants." (6:27)
- "A demo is something people admire. A product is something they get to depend on, and in many cases pay for." (10:21)
- "When one team moves fast, every process built for a different speed starts to break." (14:46)
- "For a product team, AI made building cheap. But promising didn't get any cheaper." (21:31)
- "You can copy features, but you cannot copy where people are." (35:21)
- "Move early enough to learn, and then commit carefully enough to endure." (37:50)

## Mentioned

- Eileen Gu, Olympic freestyle skier and Stanford graduate, source of the hard work versus direction analogy
- Jay Shetty's On Purpose podcast, where Eileen Gu made the direction remark
- TUM and CDTM, where Simina did her master's in Munich 15 years ago
- hybris and hybris labs, Munich commerce company acquired by SAP for about 1.5 billion dollars, home of the digital wine shelf prototype
- Xbox Game DVR (Xbox Record That), the feature she worked on while Twitch took off
- Twitch, the live streaming platform Microsoft tried to buy before Amazon acquired it
- GitHub Special Projects, the small team created after the Microsoft acquisition to win back developer trust
- GitHub Copilot Enterprise, the AI offering she launched with AI-assisted code review in preview
- Atlassian product survey, about 1,000 product people, 80 percent ship faster but customers see no more value
- IBM CEO study, 2,000 CEOs, two thirds invest in AI before understanding the value
- Kevin Weil, former CPO at OpenAI, quoted that today's model is the worst you will ever use
- Facebook's move fast and break things slogan, retired in 2014
- Cursor, Claude Code and Codex, AI coding tools that spread bottom-up from personal accounts into companies
- BMW Welt, where she met GitHub's German customers last year
- Intercom, charging 99 cents per resolved ticket as the example of per-outcome pricing
- Nan Yu, at OpenAI's Codex and formerly Linear, on people's ability to absorb what you give them as the biggest constraint
- Trader Joe's, US grocery chain owned by Aldi Nord, 4,000 products versus 50,000 and about four times the sales per square meter
- Charles Lamanna, who runs Copilot and agents at Microsoft, on agents being very harsh customers
- Dex, Dave Killeen's open source AI chief of staff, which she plans to switch to for her Friday retro
- Claude, which she uses for a weekly retro on what pushed the limits and what she learned
- Earlier speakers Martin, Verena and Dave, whose points on strategy, backlogs and truffle hunting she built on

## About the speaker

Simina Pasat was VP of Product at GitHub, where she led product management for the developer platform and took GitHub Copilot Enterprise to general availability. Before GitHub she was at Microsoft, with earlier stops at Xbox Live, SAP hybris and 4PSA. She holds a Master's from TU Munich and now builds again hands on in Seattle.

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siminapasat/