MIT PM CoP Session: Building Safe Systems While Moving Fast

Shipping autonomous and embodied AI systems forces leaders to confront a hard truth: speed without safety erodes trust, while excessive caution can stall learning and impact. This conversation explores how experienced operators make principled tradeoffs when failure is inevitable, consequences are real, and responsibility is personal.

Led by Christy Cull, this session convenes product and technical leaders to examine how real decisions get made when speed, safety, and accountability collide. Drawing on concrete examples from autonomous mobility, sensing, and consumer-scale systems, she will surface the judgment calls behind questions that rarely have clean answers:

• What does “safe enough to ship” actually mean when systems operate in the physical world?
• How do you design teams and cultures that learn through failure without putting users, partners, or the public at risk?
• How do simulation, redundancy, and rigorous retrospectives change product strategy and sequencing-not just postmortems?
• How should leaders separate career risk from system risk so decisions optimize for long-term outcomes rather than short-term optics? 

Designed for product leaders, technologists, and operators working at the frontier of autonomy and embodied AI, this session focuses less on abstract principles and more on leadership under uncertainty, where judgment, incentives, and system design matter most.

Strategic takeaway: Safety is not a brake on velocity; it is a leadership discipline that enables durable innovation, trusted products, and resilient teams.

This conversation is part of MIT Sloan's Product Management Community of Practice, a space where alumni, faculty, students and staff connect, learn, and grow together around product leadership.

Christy Cull is a technologist advancing robotics and sensing systems across autonomous and embodied AI. She has led sensing at Waymo and Lyft Level 5, and previously worked at Apple on autonomous systems and the LiDAR-enabled iPad. Her background spans MIT Lincoln Laboratory and large-scale consumer products, with a consistent focus on building safe, intelligent systems.

She advises startups and VCs on mobility, digital health, and wearables, serves as an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, and is a research affiliate with the MIT Media Lab. She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University and an MBA from MIT.