(This should not be a hot take, but here we are.)
Earlier this month a principal PM at a large SaaS company asked r/ProductManagement whether AI had destroyed product craft at everyone else's company too. His version of it: "three months of discovery has asymptoted to zero." Nothing gets signed off, and when something does, people change their minds, because the next thing already got built.
It struck a nerve. 339 upvotes and 140 comments, most of them people describing their own version of the same week. One of them put it better than I could: "your velocity is probably really big when you're falling off a cliff."
I read the whole thing, because apparently that's what I do for fun on a Sunday. Most of the fixes people proposed land in three buckets: hire more PMs, ban the tool (or at least the AI-written PRDs), or protect discovery with a new ritual and some blocked-off focus time. I've written about all three before, as the Hire Trap, the Tool Trap and the Process Trap, and what they share is that each one adds more of something to a system whose real problem is that nobody is holding it.
About halfway down, a monetization PM with seventeen years in wrote the best comment in the thread:
"The three months of discovery were never valued for themselves. They were the price of not wasting an expensive build."
His teams' answer to the new speed is simple: "every fast build has a kill criterion written down before it ships." Decide in advance what would make you stop, write it down, and agree on it before anybody is attached to the thing. I'd sign up for that tomorrow. And in 140 comments, nobody asked the follow-up I'd ask first, which is who's allowed to pull it.
The Slow Parts Used to Be Free
For most of my career the gates came built in. People are slow. Writing the spec took a week, the build took a month, and somewhere in that month someone usually noticed the thing was wrong and said so out loud. Nobody designed that pause. It was just the speed of humans doing work, and it caught a lot of mistakes for free.
AI took the pause out. The spec takes an afternoon, the build takes a day, and the thing ships before anyone has formed an opinion about it. That's the Agentic Fog in its plainest form: more output than anyone can actually look at, arriving faster than anyone can judge it.
So the friction has to go back in on purpose. Daniel Brody, a CIO and CTO, wrote about this last week under the question "Is AI bringing Waterfall thinking back?" His answer is no, we're not going back to Waterfall, but the future may be "Agile execution with Waterfall-level planning," because AI "still wants a complete brief before it starts coding." I agree with him, and I said so in his comments. What I'd add is that the plan is only half of it. The other half is the checkpoints along the way, where somebody looks at what the AI built and decides whether it's right.
I think of those checkpoints like the trim brakes on a roller coaster, the short brakes that shave off some speed before a tight turn or a big hill. If you're the adrenaline junkie in the front car, they're a bit of a bummer. They're there because at full speed that next section would hit riders with more force than the ride was designed for. I think even the adrenaline junkies would agree this is a good thing.
There's a saying in motorsports (a hobby of mine) that I use all the time, and it's the same idea:
Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
A Gate Is Only as Strong as Whoever Backs It
The fundamentals themselves aren't complicated: a written kill criterion, a spec somebody actually read, a ticket number on every PR so you can trace what shipped back to why it shipped. None of this is new, and none of it is hard to write down. The hard part is the first time somebody skips it.
In a very small company, under fifteen people or so, the answer is easy: the founder is the gate. Whatever the founder says holds, because there's nobody else to appeal to. As the company grows it spreads to a small group, usually a CTO or a CPO alongside the CEO. And once a company brings in someone like me to hold the machine together, the gate needs something specific from the people above it. A leader has to say, out loud, to the team: I'm 100% behind this, there are consequences for skipping it, and this person is in charge of keeping it on the rails.
What I've seen more often than I'd like goes differently. The leader asks whether I can fix the thing that keeps breaking. I say yes, here's the gate. The leader says sounds good. I put it in. The team doesn't follow it, because following it is slower and nobody has told them whether it's optional, so they test it. Then something breaks, it gets loud, and the leader who said sounds good decides this isn't the hill. The gate is still in the wiki. Nobody uses it.
I don't think that's a character flaw. A lot of founders (especially those who have scar tissue from intense bosses in the past) want to be the nice boss, and I get it, nobody starts a company hoping to be the enforcer. Backing a gate means siding with a process against a person you like, on a day when the process is costing you speed. That's expensive, and a verbal yes in a meeting doesn't pre-pay any of it.
The team isn't the villain either. If a rule has never cost anyone anything to ignore, ignoring it is the rational move. People learn the real boundaries of an organization very quickly, and they learn them by watching what happens the first time someone ignores one.
This is what the Operator Vacuum looks like when it's sitting inside a process that technically exists. The gate is written down and everybody signed off on it. What's missing is someone with the authority to hold it and the backing to survive holding it. Put someone in the Operator Seat without that backing and what you've got is a person with opinions and a Notion page.
None of this gets easier as the company gets bigger. In a large org, one sponsor's conviction thins out fast, and a gate that only one leader believes in gets ignored politely instead of openly, which is harder to see and harder to fix.
Can't We Just Automate It?
This is the strongest objection, and I agree with most of it. Stop relying on goodwill. If the ticket number matters, make CI block the merge when it's missing (you can even have the agent add it). A deterministic check beats a social one every time, and I'd make that call before I asked anyone to put their foot down.
That moves the question to a different desk, though. Somebody has to decide to turn the blocker on, and take the complaints when it's in the way at six o'clock on a release night. And the version that actually stalls is when the person who owns the pipeline disagrees with the gate. Say it's your release manager. Now two people have legitimate claims on the same step, and neither of them can settle it. Only somebody above both of them can. If that person won't pick, the gate is dead, and it doesn't matter who was right.
Automation moves the gatekeeper question. Somebody still has to decide to turn it on and take the heat.
The Question to Ask Before the Next Gate
Before you approve the next gate, ask what happens the first time somebody skips it, and who says so. If you can't answer both halves in one sentence, you've approved documented process theatre.
I don't have the rest of this solved. Getting the yes is my job, and I usually get it. Keeping it is where I still lose sometimes, and I don't love pointing at the leader when that happens, because I was in the room when we agreed.
Lately I've been wondering whether the ask itself is wrong. Instead of asking for a quick verbal backing from the leader, create a recurring ritual where the leader keeps showing they mean it, like a standing review on the calendar that the team can watch them protect (and the ritual needs protecting just as much as the backing does). Quick verbal backing is nearly ephemeral. It gets dropped the first time it's inconvenient. A ritual has to be cancelled on purpose, and everybody notices when it is. My time at Expedia showed me first hand how well this can work.
In the meantime, if you're the one who gave that quick verbal backing: which of your gates would still be standing after one bad release?