New Friction 11: Before Asking How Fast You Can Ship, Ask How Fast Customers Can Adopt

In this episode of the New Friction series from the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Daniel Elizalde, VP of Product and Technology at ReUp Education, about why faster AI-powered building doesn't automatically produce business results. Daniel describes the "speed fallacy" in B2B, where long sales cycles, security reviews, and limited customer attention cap how fast products can be adopted. He explains how he now treats product and engineering as a portfolio, pausing roadmaps and moving teams to wherever the real bottleneck sits, anchored by a shared company vision that his team communicated through an AI-generated video. The conversation covers misaligned incentives in sales and marketing, the risk of everyone vibe coding their own tools without a shared data layer, and the standardized agents and skills his engineers use with Claude. Daniel closes with the F1 analogy that a faster engine means little if the rest of the car and the track can't keep up.