Felix Geelhaar runs product and R&D operations at PandaDoc, after years in engineering and product and a stint at Snyk. That seat lets him watch how product, engineering, design and go-to-market actually hand work to each other, and his talk opens with a scene everyone in the room recognised. Monday, right before sprint planning: quick one before the planning, I have an idea. A ticket appears. Build the smart filter, dropdown, tags, CSV export, design attached, this is final. The one pager was written by Claude from a couple of Gong calls and some metrics. It is six pages long, so nobody reads it. The ticket goes straight to an agent, and engineering never gets to ask why.
His thesis: AI speeds up the wiring you already have. However product, engineering, design and go-to-market connect today, AI makes that connection faster without fixing it. He names three joints. The handoff, where work changes hands. The check, what stands between the work and the customer. The signal, how the customer's reaction travels back. Agile optimised for time to market. With AI the goal becomes time to signal. And the front was thin before AI arrived: Atlassian's 2026 State of Product survey found that 82 percent of teams have no engineers involved at ideation, and only 4 percent can trace a roadmap decision back to customer evidence.
Then he speeds up every station. Engineering ships 42 issues faster, 420 pile up at review, and the natural reflex is an agent named Steve that stamps looks good to me on all of them. Go-to-market hears about the release when a customer asks why the button moved. He quotes Geoff Charles of Ramp: AI simply removes the bottleneck, but moves it. Backlog refinement, the slow ritual where engineering got to ask why, was what kept teams out of the build trap. Three or four hands in the room still do it. Claire Vo's observation completes the picture: your roadmap empties faster, which means every bad idea still on it ships too.
The fix starts at the front. Product brings the problem, the proof and a prototype, the practice Ramp uses and Marty Cagan describes in Transformed: a clickable truth that falsifies an assumption before engineering touches it. Then wire the check on purpose. Linear runs Quality Wednesday, one fix per person per week to train the eye for quality, and a feature roast before each beta where fresh eyes look and the beta owner decides whether to ship. Gene Kim's Wiring the Winning Organization calls this slowifying: slow down at chosen moments to go faster overall. Add deliberate launch moments so go-to-market stays wired in, then keep tracking the signal after launch instead of forgetting the feature.
The Q&A ran long because the keynote was moved back 15 minutes. On people and pushback, Felix described a cross-functional pilot at PandaDoc that first drew the company's interaction model, who talks to whom and why, then fixed one link at a time with retrospectives in between. On regulated environments, drawing on FedRAMP work at Snyk, he said evidence collection is the real gap and no tool collects it in real time yet. On where context should live, he argued against markdown piling up in repos and pointed to a queryable company layer that answers whether there is customer evidence for an assumption, with sources attached.
