CPO at Business Insider | The Speed Playbook: How to Build a High-Velocity Product Engine

Something strange started happening at Business Insider in January 2025. Engineers were finishing three-month projects in weeks. Engineering managers were raising their hands asking for more work. The bottleneck that had defined product and technology teams for decades had flipped, and nobody had a playbook for what to do next. Jefferson Rabb, CPO at Business Insider, shares what his team learned in six months of operating at unprecedented engineering velocity: what caused it, what broke as a result, and the tactical changes that let product keep up. Key Takeaways: Why AI-assisted coding is doing more than speeding up code output: it's changing engineer confidence, risk tolerance, and willingness to work across unfamiliar codebases in ways that have deep ripple effects on how product teams operate. Why the entire buy-versus-build logic has been scrambled: with the cost of building internally approaching zero, committing to a replatforming project for more than six to twelve months is increasingly hard to justify. How Business Insider evolved from a relay race to a basketball game, getting engineers involved before requirements are finalized, normalizing vibe coding and rapid prototyping by PMs, and formally committing engineers to work that doesn't yet have stakeholder buy-in. Why when capacity is no longer the dominant prioritization constraint, the most important question stops being is this the best idea and becomes is this a good idea, and what that shift means for how CPOs think about product bloat, sunsetting, and org readiness. 00:00 🎙️ The Unprecedented Speed of AI-Assisted Engineering 01:04 🚨 Engineering Is Now Getting Ahead of Product 02:02 📊 20x More Product Launches: The Numbers Don't Lie 04:08 🔍 Digging Into Why: What Actually Changed in January 05:11 💪 AI Coding's Hidden Win: Engineer Confidence & Risk Tolerance 06:57 🔄 Organizational Ripple Effects: Replatforming Is Dead 08:17 💸 Technical Debt Has a New Reputation 09:06 🗑️ The Rise of Expendable Code 10:01 🚪 Rethinking PM Gatekeeping When Engineering Flies 11:18 🏀 From Relay Race to Basketball Game 12:20 ❓ If Capacity Isn't the Constraint, What Is? 13:09 ⚠️ The New Dangers: Product Bloat & Premature Sunsetting 14:40 🤝 Show Don't Tell: PMs Building Functional Prototypes 16:46 🌀 Blurring Product & Engineering Roles on Purpose 18:08 ✅ 6 To-Dos for Optimizing Your Org for Engineering Velocity Meet the Speaker: Jefferson Rabb is the Chief Product Officer at Business Insider, where he leads a cross-functional organization spanning product, engineering, design, and data. A strategic leader known for scaling high-growth digital media. Jeff joined BI from The Atlantic, where he played a pivotal role in the brand’s digital transformation and its milestone of surpassing one million subscribers. View Speaker's Full Profile: https://prdct.school/49aNPKf 💼 Make Your Product Team Truly AI-Native with tailored AI training: https://prdct.school/46Lp0n6 🚀 Learn AI skills and become an AI-Native PM: https://prdct.school/3RVzRDv ABOUT US: Product School (https://prdct.school/4rxzajh) is the leader in AI training for Product teams, trusted by Fortune 500 companies and a community of 2.5M+ professionals. Our expert-led, live, hands-on programs, run by AI-first product leaders, embed practical AI skills to help organizations innovate faster, experiment at scale, and achieve measurable business outcomes.