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JG Jayesh Govindarajan On Product Growth

“The bottleneck is no longer writing code. The bottleneck is writing quality code, writing code that works all the time, having the test cases that fail before it hits production.”

Product Growth · Product & Design · November 2026

“The bottleneck is no longer writing code. The bottleneck is writing quality code, writing code that works all the time, having the test cases that fail before it hits production.” — Jayesh Govindarajan, Product Growth

Context

Talking about tech debt and speed, Govindarajan said agents can now help with code review and security work. He sees the constraint on shipping as shifting from producing code to verifying it.

Transcript

Product Growth
Jayesh Govindarajan

…trade-off. The trade-off is you don't want to break systems. If all you're going to do is iterate rapidly, once you have the kind of customer base that Salesforce has, things start to break and then that slows you down even further. You want to be able to balance and do both. Yeah. People used to

Aakash Gupta

create lots of tech debt when they would switch to this.

Jayesh Govindarajan

…for what that means from a tech debt perspective. But for the first time, we can have agents help with tech debt too. Like, how do you build this like this work we do with our amazing security team? There's work we do with our release management teams for building agents that are specialized, that do code reviews. How do you pull a PR, a high-quality PR, really fast? What are the bottlenecks? The bottleneck is no longer writing code. The bottleneck is writing quality code, writing code that works all the time, having the test cases that fail before it hits production. These are now the bottlenecks, each of which, if you go really deep, you can start to build agents for and speed up by itself. So, yeah.

Aakash Gupta

Okay. So, I think we covered the life cycle. I think the very last component at the very top of the pyramid is probably where you spend a lot of your time. How engineers, product managers, and executives who are really setting the strategy of what we're working on collaborate to build a roadmap.…

Jayesh Govindarajan

Great question. So, let me take a step back first. I think at a high level, I'd say taste, judgment play a much bigger part than they did before. That's what forms the intuition on the broad vector along which you want to move the organization, the team, the product. But I said broad vector, it's…

Aakash Gupta

I want to return to that role layer because you brought up the forward-deployed engineer. It's got to be the hottest, sexiest new role in tech. And for my audience, it's the forward-deployed product. Manager. That's super interesting to them. What do you see? Are these roles replacing the…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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