AI is making product teams faster than ever — but faster doesn’t always mean better. In this Techzine TV interview from Atlassian Team Europe in Amsterdam, Axel Suija, product manager evangelist at Atlassian, challenges some of the most deeply held assumptions about how product teams should be working in the age of AI agents.
If you manage products, work alongside a product team, or lead a technology organization, the insights in this conversation will make you rethink what “productivity” actually means when AI can build almost anything on demand.
Axel shares eye-opening data from Atlassian’s State of Product report — a study of 1,000 product leaders across the US, France, and Germany — that reveals a paradox hiding inside almost every AI-accelerated team. He also introduces a new Atlassian product designed specifically to close the gap between the speed of building and the quality of what gets built.
What you’ll discover in this interview
This is not a conversation about tools or tactics. It’s a fundamental rethinking of what product managers need to be good at — and where the real leverage is in modern product development. Here’s a taste of what Axel covers:
- Why the title “product managers who can’t build will be left behind” is more literal than you might think — and what “building” actually means today
- The surprising data point from Atlassian’s State of Product report that reveals a major disconnect between shipping speed and customer value
- Why shipping more features faster can actually make things worse for your customers — and the cognitive reason behind it
- Where the real bottleneck in product development has shifted to, now that coding is no longer the hard part
- How Atlassian’s new Feedback App approaches the challenge of processing enterprise-scale feedback signals from sources like Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack, and Jira
- Whether AI can be trusted to surface feedback that’s mentioned only once but is critically important — and how Atlassian handles this
- Where AI stops and human judgment must take over in the product decision process
Why this matters right now
Product teams everywhere are under pressure to show that AI investments are paying off. But the conversation around AI in product development has been almost entirely focused on speed. Axel makes a compelling case that the teams who will win are those who use AI to get smarter about what they build — not just faster at building it. The difference between those two approaches is bigger than most leaders realize.
Watch the full interview to find out what Atlassian’s research actually shows, how the Feedback App works in practice, and why Axel believes the most important skill for product managers right now isn’t coding, prompting, or even strategy — it’s knowing what not to build.