Two Clicks to Production: How We Reduced Release Time from Two Weeks to Two Hours

We completely rethought our release process. By redesigning workflows, introducing QA gates, expanding automation, and integrating AI agents, we reduced our release cycle from 2–3 weeks to 2 hours while decreasing the number of people involved from five to one.

This talk is based on real experience transforming the release process in a product team. I'll share practical solutions, their limitations, and the lessons learned.

In this talk, I'll cover:

• how to identify the real bottlenecks in a release process;

• which QA gates accelerate releases and which add bureaucracy;

• how to embed quality control directly into CI/CD;

• where AI agents genuinely improve the release process and which tasks can already be delegated to them;

• which metrics enable confident release decisions without endless meetings and approvals.

The result was a release process that went from 2–3 weeks to 2 hours, where a single engineer can perform work that previously required coordination across an entire team.