The longer I work on Proxi the more convinced I get that iteration speed is the only moat left. A competitor can clone your features in a weekend and copy your positioning by Friday. Nobody can copy how fast you turn a customer problem into a live fix the customer knows about. McKinsey measured this across a few hundred large companies. The top quartile on developer velocity grew revenue four to five times faster than the bottom. I believe it, and I'd bet the gap is wider now.
Most people get speed wrong, though. Building stopped being the slow step a while ago. Atlassian's own research found developers saving around ten hours a week with AI tools and losing roughly ten hours a week to organizational friction. Friction eats the whole gain, and none of it goes to hard problems. The hours go to coordination and to chasing down what's actually going on.
You see it most clearly in the tracker. Productboard surveyed 1,400 product people. 70 percent of teams organize delivery around an issue tracker like Jira, but only 41 percent could keep their roadmap up to date, down from 57 percent the year before. Nobody's lazy. Updating a tracker is unpaid bookkeeping. The real state of the work lives in people's heads and in customer calls that never make it into a ticket. Linear or Jira only knows what someone remembered to type in. Every team we talk to says a version of the same thing. The board looks great for a week after the big cleanup, then it drifts back into fiction.
Feedback is worse. Hardly any team gets customer input flowing into prioritization in an organized way, and almost nobody closes the loop with the customer who asked. What customers tell you reaches the roadmap the same way it did in 2015. A person copy pastes quotes between tabs. That person has forty other things to do. So the signal sits there. The teams that handle this well all cheat the same way. They make one person the human router for everything, and it works right up until that person goes on vacation.
None of this is a Linear problem or a Jira problem. The trackers are fine. What's broken is everything around them, where humans move state between systems by hand. Discipline doesn't fix it, we've tried, everyone's tried. The fix is making the boring parts automatic. Intake, dedupe, status updates, telling the customer their thing shipped. Do that and customer driven execution becomes something the system does for you. The teams that get there first will lap everyone.