Roundtable: Customer Centricity and Connection

The pressure right now is not shipping. Anyone can ship. The pressure is meaning. Engineering teams are moving faster than their understanding of who they are building for, and velocity without contact turns roadmaps into guesses with better tooling. Backlogs get polished. Metrics get cleaner. The human signal gets fuzzier. Somewhere along the way, customer centricity stopped being a practice and became a slogan, which is usually how good ideas quietly exit the building.

That is the gap the Engineering Leadership Community is stepping into with Roundtable: Customer Centricity and Connection on March 25, 2026. Not as a webinar. Not as a keynote parade. As a 1 hour, online, peer level conversation designed for engineering leaders who already know the frameworks and want to talk about where they break. ELC has been convening this caliber of leadership since 2016, and the through line has always been honest rooms over loud stages.

The room matters here. This is not an open mic for hot takes. This is an invite only circle of engineering leaders who have lived the consequences of distance between builders and users. Online, yes, but tuned for depth. The kind of discussion where silence does work, where people admit what failed, and where the word customer means a real person, not a persona in a slide deck.

Eli Snell is hosting, and that context carries weight. As Head of Product Engineering at Roche, Eli Snell leads software platform strategy and AI engineering across a global digital health organization where abstraction has real world consequences. Eli Snell’s career spans more than 20+ years in healthcare software and medical devices, including time where the output of engineering work met patients in operating rooms, not dashboards. When someone like that frames customer connection as an engineering problem, it lands differently.

The premise is deceptively simple. A backlog is useful until it becomes the product. When teams lose the thread between discovery and delivery, they do not slow down. They just ship the wrong things with confidence. This roundtable is built around restoring that thread through lightweight customer touchpoints, shared understanding instead of ticket churn, and honest comparison of what has actually worked across organizations of different shapes and constraints.

Zoom out and the timing gets sharper. The ELC calendar is stacked with conversations about AI agents, productivity metrics, platforms, and scale. All necessary. This is the counterbalance. The reminder that connection is infrastructure too, and that the most expensive bug in any system is forgetting who the system is for.

No crescendo needed here. Just a room, a question, and leaders willing to sit with it long enough to feel the answer forming.