Roundtable: Customer Centricity and Connection
A backlog is useful—until it becomes the product. When engineering work loses connection to the people it’s for, the “why” disappears, teams disengage, and we ship the wrong things faster.
I learned this firsthand standing in an operating room as a patient received a pacemaker my team designed. It was a visceral reminder: we’re not building tickets—we’re building outcomes for real humans.
This roundtable is for leaders who want to bring that context back. We’ll share practical ways to connect engineers directly with customers—so teams build with empathy, sharper judgment, and better results.
We’ll cover:
- Lightweight engineer–customer touchpoints that scale
- Keeping “why” intact from discovery → delivery
- Turning feedback into shared understanding (not just more tickets)
- What’s worked (and failed) across different orgs
About the host:
Eli Snell is the head of Product Engineering for a digital health business unit of Roche. In this role, he's responsible for software platform product strategy and driving more effective ways of working across the global engineering organization, including the AI engineering strategy and agile transformation. He has over 20 years of software engineering leadership experience in the healthcare industry, including medical devices and digital health software applications.
