Most teams treat product development like a relay race.
Discovery happens. Roadmap updates. Tickets get written. Build starts. Then weeks later, you circle back to customers and find out what they actually need.
The problem? Customer reality and the competitive landscape don't wait for your sprint cycle. They're changing continuously. But legacy processes only update intermittently—because historically, it's been expensive to do otherwise.
At AFINEA Labs, we asked: what if the signal was always on?
So we built an end-to-end agentic workflow that runs three reinforcing loops: signal, roadmap, and build. Agents handle synthesis and execution. Humans steer strategy and make approval calls.
Here's how it works:
Every design partner conversation gets transcribed. A Notion agent extracts structured signal—bugs, feature requests, recurring themes—and links each item back to the specific call it came from. We never lose the thread. We never start discovery from scratch.
A Perplexity-based agent runs weekly competitive sweeps. Product launches, positioning shifts, pricing changes, notable wins. It produces a delta summary of what changed and why it matters. This used to happen "when someone had time." Now it just happens.
Another agent compares competitive updates against our product vision, current roadmap, and known pain points. It generates proposals: threat responses, whitespace opportunities, things customers are actively pulling us toward.
Then a Claude Code agent maps proposals onto the codebase, estimates difficulty, flags risks, and creates GitHub epics with enough structure that the build loop runs without vague requirements.
And nightly? We let the agents play. Claude Code gets 2-3 hours of free time. It picks what's worth working on, writes code, runs tests, follows repo conventions, and produces a PR with a full paper trail. When we wake up, there's often a surprisingly clever PR waiting for review.
This isn't unfettered autonomy. It works because we're strict about verification and checkpoints. Humans own strategy, prioritization, and final approval. Agents own execution, synthesis, and scaffolding. Every item lands through a renewable PR with an audit trail. Tests are first-class artifacts, not afterthoughts.
The deeper idea: product development should be a living system, not a chain of handoffs.
Customer reality continuously distilled. Competition continuously tracked. Code shipping nightly, all verified and reviewable.
The payoff isn't just speed. It's consistency, discipline, focus, with humans spending time where it actually matters.
Carpe Agentem 🔄
#AgenticDevelopment #ProductDevelopment #AI #SyntheticLeverage
Mark Ruddock
Thoughts of an internationally experienced growth stage CEO and Board Member.
Thoughts of an internationally experienced growth stage CEO and Board Member
Mark Ruddock
Thoughts of an internationally experienced growth stage CEO and Board Member.
Experienced international CEO with three exits and over 20 years of experience at the helm of VC-backed technology and fintech startups. I've founded companies and come in as a later-stage CEO to help existing companies scale. My experience spans multi-country online financial services, mission-critical enterprise software and consumer-focused mobile applications.
Currently CEO of Kontent.ai, the industry's first CMS with native AI capabilities, kontent.ai helps the world's leading organizations generate an unparalleled return on their content by enabling them to create, manage, distribute, and optimize their content at scale with unprecedented speed oversight, and security.
Before that, I was CEO of Nuula (formerly known as BFS Capital), which Nav acquired. At Nuula, we believed there was a better way to help run your small business — so we built it. Nuula is a mobile application that gives small business owners instant access to critical business metrics and innovative financial products anytime, anywhere. It provides small business owners with the tools, content, and capital they need to be successful in a modern, competitive market.
Prior to that interim CEO of 4finance. Agreed to take on an interim role to help clarify strategy, accelerate the critical transformation of the business and set the company on a course for the next growth phase.
Before that, I was Managing Director, International at Wonga, responsible for overseeing all businesses outside of the UK, including consumer lending businesses in Canada, Spain, Poland and South Africa and our eCommerce and product financing business BillPay in Germany. Prior to that was CEO of Wonga Canada.
Prior to that, I was EO Viigo. When Viigo was acquired by Blackberry in 2010, the company had hundreds of partners, won numerous awards, including “PC Magazine’s Editors Choice“, the “Most Promising New Company of the Year” from the CNMA, and the “Wireless Leadership Award” from RIM, signed marquee enterprise customers such as Oppenheimer, UBS, BAT and Scotts and been downloaded over 3MM times, becoming one of the most popular BlackBerry apps of all time.
I started my career as the Founder and CEO of INEA. A software company that was a strategic partner to many of the world's leading financial institutions, INEA had deployments in over 44 countries. Backed by RBC, Ventures West, APAX and Edgestone, the company was acquired in June 2005 by Cartesis. Cartesis was subsequently acquired by Business Objects in 2007, which was later acquired by SAP.
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