Why Engineering Velocity Still Breaks

In 2026, most engineering teams have the frameworks, the cloud, and the AI tooling. Velocity still breaks. It breaks between commit and production - in the deployment systems, the infra tickets that sit in someone’s backlog while the feature waits. This session is for engineering leaders who’ve modernised the stack but still can’t answer why shipping feels harder than it should. We’ll examine where delivery actually stalls in modern web stacks, whether managed platforms and AI are genuinely fixing the problem or just masking fragile foundations, and what it looks like when the layer between development and production finally stops being a liability.